


apizza

by heavyliesthecrown



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: 4x17, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Break Up, Cheating, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Introspection, Recreational Drug Use, Slow Burn, Therapy, Underage Drinking, discussion of religious concepts, main pairing in relationships with other people for a time, minor characters from Archieverse masquerading as college folk, welcome to hell - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:55:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23911153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavyliesthecrown/pseuds/heavyliesthecrown
Summary: Where do you go after you’ve done a horrible and terrible thing? What falls apart and what remains? What can be fixed and what can’t be? How do you live with the guilt? Do you let it overwhelm you, or do you try to manage it? Do you mitigate it? What’s the most righteous way to be after having been so wrong? How do you live with the fact that you’ve hurt the people you love most? How do you live with yourself?Does redemption exist?
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Adam Chisholm, Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones, Jughead Jones/Joani Jumpp
Comments: 168
Kudos: 243
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees, 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards — Winners!





	1. canto i - senior i

**Author's Note:**

> My goal in writing this was to take what was an out-of-character decision/choice and see what the in-character ramifications would be, what this bad act would do to both their psyches, and how they’d change because of it. I tried to make this as realistic as possible, both to their characters and how I believe people at this age generally behave and think. So, it’s ugly, and messy, and sometimes dark, because that’s what cheating does. There might be decisions you don’t agree with or that you find unpalatable. I am happy to discuss in the comments, as always! But if you’re being hateful for the sake of being hateful and/or have happened on this fic without reading notes and tags and have made yourself upset - don’t do that. Be decent, people. A few logistical notes:  
> 1\. **This is written with the premise that Betty and Archie sleep together.** I did not watch the episode and did not realize until a few days later, they actually did not. At that point, a lot of this had been written/planned and there was some speculation they might in 4x18, so I kept it as is. If you cannot stand that idea, this fic is not for you.  
> 2\. They will both have relationships and encounters with other people. If you cannot stand that idea, again, this fic is not for you.  
> 3\. I haven’t been keeping up with the show, so there are bits of canon I’ve picked up and dropped. Most important - they did not burn down the trailer and the Coopers did not sell their house; they live in their respective homes. They’re both going to Yale. I have no idea what’s up with Polly and if she’s alive or not, but she’s around in this.  
> 4\. The extent of my research for Yale was Gilmore Girls and a little internet dabbling; it will inevitably not be 100 percent accurate.  
> 

“ _I cannot remember how I entered the forest. My thoughts were full of other things when I wandered off the path._ ”

\- Inferno, Dante, Canto I

Where do you go after you’ve done a horrible and terrible thing? What falls apart and what remains? What can be fixed and what can’t be? How do you live with the guilt? Do you let it overwhelm you, or do you try to manage it? Do you mitigate it? What’s the most righteous way to be after having been so wrong? How do you live with the fact that you’ve hurt the people you love most? How do you live with yourself?

Does redemption exist?

If it does, how can it be earned? Who grants it?

These are the questions she asks herself.

The fallout happens quietly.

It is loud in her head, at first, a constant thrum— _wasitworthit, wasitworthit, wasitworthit, wasitworthit—_ like the beat of a drum.

And sometimes, she’ll think yes, it was.

She’ll tell herself that, well, she felt something in that moment.

 _She_ _felt it,_ then she acted on it, so how could that be anything less than authentic?

Those times don’t happen too often, though.

It happens once when she’s at her locker, when the corner of a piece of notebook paper flutters out at her, jagged at the edges. The words _love you so much_ are scrawled on it, along with a little drawing of two stick figures, one with a ponytail made of lines, an incredibly detailed pizza slice, and an arrow. _Five months!!!!!!!_ is written under it in parentheses.

Seven exclamation marks.

It happens again when she’s in a ball on her bed with an especially bad bout of period cramps, gasping through each shallow breath. He delivers chicken soup from Pop’s to her window in a deluge. The paper cup is soggy, and his hair is completely straight from the rain.

These are the times she’ll go, yes, it was worth it. Because she recognizes, in these moments, the ones where the depth of his love hits her with the weight of a truck, just how good a person he is, how much she is truly and desperately cared for. And when that happens, she has to tell herself what she did was worth it because she has to have some kind of reason— _any_ kind of reason that was worth even a fraction of an iota—that she’d do something this wickedly horrendous to someone who loves her like this. Someone, who without a shadow of a doubt, would never do this to her.

But most of the time, and if she’s being honest, even in the times she tells herself it was worth it, she concludes that it was not.

It was the most stupid, useless thing she has ever done. It will destroy everything, all the friendships, all the bonds they’d built, and at a time when they were supposed to be preserving them, too. It has saddled her with a guilt that has made her physically sick, multiple times, and all over town. At school. At home. In the trash can on the corner of her street near the bus stop.

Betty doesn’t think Veronica knows yet, since she’s still full of smiles and full steam ahead on all things prom, and she’s still including her.

She doesn’t discuss with Archie what they’ll be doing about Jughead and Veronica. For her, though, it’s easy. She’ll be telling him because that’s the right thing to do, and she has to do the right thing. She has to after she’s done such an incredibly wrong one.

It is very hard to find the right time to do the right thing, though. At Pop’s on a Friday, the words reach her teeth, but she inhales and swallows them back down quickly. This will be devastating and horrible, and it is not right of her to taint the place he loves so much with as bad a memory as this will be.

She doesn’t know if it’s the right time, but _the_ time comes somewhere near the end of April when he tells her to go on ahead to the Blue and Gold. He’ll be right there after he washes his hands; there’s salt and vinegar on them. It’s the most innocuous and nondescript place she can think of in Riverdale, the men’s bathroom at the high school, so she follows him in.

Jughead turns and looks at her with such a kind, amused little look. For a moment, she thinks about how convenient it is that she’s in a bathroom, replete with multiple places to vomit.

“Is this you checking off all the places you want to see in town before we leave it? Or is it about something more, ah, _physical_ , because I’m down if you-”

“I had sex with Archie.”

Jughead laughs and her first thought is how much she would like to bring her head down hard as she can onto the sink just so she can pass out and avoid what comes next. It occurs to her that he’s laughing because he has so much faith in her that she’d never do something like this, and that the only reason she’d say something like that had to be if she were making some kind of stupid, tone-deaf joke.

But his laughter dies abruptly when her punchline never comes, and she knows that she will remember the broken, devastated way he is looking at her for the rest of her life and all her lifetimes after. He runs his hand over his head, swooping his hat off before crossing his arms.

“When?”

“March.”

He is standing as still as she’s ever seen him. He blinks once, which is the only way she knows she hasn’t physically killed him on the spot. Mentally, emotionally, she knows she has.

“It was one time,” Betty says into the quiet. Everything tumbles out after that. “It was one time, one _bad_ time, and it meant nothing. It was a stupid, horrible thing I did that I wish I didn’t do and—no, Jug, wait—”

That’s when he moves past her and leaves.

The hat goes into the trash on his way out.

The only time it’s ever loud is really her fault.

He finds her later after she’s wandered home—she doesn’t even remember when or how, but she’d definitely missed the rest of the school day. He cries when he sits her down and tells her, very simply, that it’s over; he can’t be with her anymore. But it’s soft, a quiet kind of crying, all silent, fat tears, punctuated by a handful of sniffles.

It’s her that wails. She’d known this was coming because this is not the kind of thing that can be patched over with _I’m sorry_ and _I love you,_ even though she is sorry and she does love him and she’ll try like thirteen kinds of hell to put on whatever band-aid fits over a wound like this. But it’s happening now, this sickening moment she’s been anticipating. It is so much worse than she ever thought it would be, and she is so much weaker than she should be for someone who decided to to put this consequence in her own life.

She wails and weeps big, heaving sobs that shake her body like an earthquake. They bring on hiccups she hasn’t experienced the likes of since she was a child. She says strings of things she doesn’t even know that she’s saying, just things she knows she means—that she loves him, that she’s so incredibly and profoundly sorry, that it was a mistake, that she will die if he walks out her door because she can’t live without him.

But it’s not enough.

Not that she ever thought it would be.

When he goes to her door, her self preservation takes over and she scrambles in front of it, edging past him and throwing her arms out wide to block his exit. She will die if he leaves, she repeats.

She already feels like she’s dying and he’s still here.

Jughead crushes her to him then, suddenly. It’s not a hug—those are nice and warm and comforting. This is desperate and brutal and it feels like death. His face is in her neck and the entire side of it is wet; whatever mixture of tears and saliva he’s staining on her skin slips down past her collarbone and soaks into her sweater. The fraction of her mind that’s rational knows that’s all she’ll have left of him after he’s gone, the collection of his tears on her sweater, but it doesn’t stop her from trying to make him stay.

Betty digs her fingers into his back and claws her nails into his skin, and even though she doesn’t believe in God, she asks, in that moment, if he’s up there, if she can please keep him. For the love of everything—for the love of all the holy things, please. She will be good. She will never do anything wrong in her life again, and she will repent for her sins even after her death as long as she can keep him.

But Jughead is shaking in her arms in a violent, horrific way, and to feel the physical manifestation of what she’s done to him, this visceral, uncontrollable reaction _she_ has caused in him— _that_ is death and then, she’s really dying. She is cold and she can’t breathe, she can’t think. It’s dying and she’s sure of it.

Jughead turns her after a while and detaches her from him, ducking under her arms as they claw and scrabble to hold onto any part of him she can. She is underwater and he is the surface and air. She is magma and ash trapped in a volcano, reaching for the outside. And when she can’t reach the surface and the air and the outside, Betty is on her knees on the ground, grabbing onto one of his legs and throwing all her weight into keeping him rooted in place.

“Betty, please.” He’s kneeling now, at eye-level with her. “Please don’t do this. I can’t stay.”

“Yes, you can.” She sputters through the salt and spit and phlegm in her mouth. “You can. Please, Jug. _Please_. Just five more minutes. One minute. Ten seconds.” Betty doesn’t know what she’d do or say with more time, she just knows that she wants it. “I love you,” she says. “I love you so much. And you love me. I love you and you love me, so you can stay. It’s fixable. I can fix this—I promise I can fix this.”

He cups her face. Betty thinks he’s trying to cradle her chin in his palm to turn her to him, but she can’t look at him because she knows there will be a horrible finality waiting for her if she does. She twists away like a petulant child avoiding strained peas. He ends up holding her cheek and half her mouth in his hand.

“I do love you.” He’s crying still, and it’s so uncomfortable to hear someone she loves cry like that. “I do. I won't lie and say that I don’t; it doesn’t just fall away like that.”

“Then stay while I fix it. Please. _Please._ It’s fixable. I can do it, I promise I can. You just have to let me try. We’ll eat pizza in New Haven, and I’ll fix it. We can still do that. It’ll be fixed. It’s fixable.”

“It’s not,” Jughead says, and it’s so horrible and so honest, such an ugly reality where he’s crying and she’s weeping, that the hiccups she's been trying to hold back explode along with her wails in one gross, wet sputter across his face. He wipes it off with his shirt sleeve before dabbing a little at the mess she is. “It’s not. I think a part of me even wishes that it were, but it’s not, Betty. So I can’t stay. Okay? I can’t stay.”

 _“No,”_ Betty wails, and if she were anyone else watching her, she thinks she might’ve laughed at the dramatic, pathetic wolf-like sound that rips from the back of her throat. It’s like something from a daytime soap or a reality show; something that doesn't exist in real life. “No, no, no, no— _please_.” She wrinkles the fabric of his jeans between her clenched fingers and drags herself as close to him as possible, thudding her head onto his chest just so that more of her body touches his. She feels his cheek rest on top of her head. “I’ll die. I’ll really die if you go, so please just stay. Stay with me. Just stay here.”

“Baby, I can’t,” he says one more time against her hair. “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

And after he untangles the grip she has around his leg—it takes him work, but he does eventually—he’s gone, and she is alone.

She falls asleep on the floor, stays there for a few days.

In the moments she’s awake, and not in a screaming match with her mother about how she needs to shower or eat or go back to school, Betty thinks, dividing her thoughts pretty equally between why she’d done this terrible thing and what she should do about it now.

And it’s frustrating, it’s _so_ frustrating, because she doesn’t know why. She’d done it, and she doesn’t know why. She can’t write a topic sentence about it. She can’t understand the sequence of neurotransmissions that had led her to Archie and the garage.

Maybe it’d been a nostalgia thing. It’s all they can do at school now—talk about how everything’s the last time. It’s the last time they’ll swipe cookies from the cafeteria and tuck them into their pockets, the last time they’ll see the Bulldogs play the Ravens, the last time they’ll skip Calculus on the third week in May, so they better cherish it and take advantage. And maybe, while wrapped up in all that nostalgia, her dumb fucking brain went— _you know what, Betty Cooper? This might be your last chance to sleep with Archie, too!_

Maybe it’d been validating in a way, even though the idea makes her curl into an even tighter ball and knock her forehead against her knees repeatedly. It’s embarrassing if that’s the reason; it’s contrary to everything she wants and thinks she stands for. She doesn’t need to be validated by any man—not Archie, not Jughead. But it needles her, this thought. Maybe she wanted to prove something to herself or to Archie, that after all this time saying he didn’t want her, saying she was nothing more than a sister to him—he finally did. She was desirable to him and finally, he wanted her like that.

Maybe she’s the biggest bitch on the planet, the absolute worst person in the world, and thought that an appropriate response to a fight with her boyfriend who loves her was to grab his best friend, raise both their feet together, and stomp on his heart until it gave out.

Maybe it’s none of the above.

Maybe it’s all the above.

She doesn’t know the answer and that tears her up. She’s always been very answer-oriented, as far as people go.

What to do about everything is a little easier. She will be good. She will never cheat again. She’ll never even have sex again if that’s what equates to being a good person after this, but she knows that’s not it. She will do whatever twelve tasks she needs to right her wrong, and she’ll become a redeemed person.

They’re big, lofty goals that seem almost out of reach because of their lack of specificity. But they’re goals. They’re steps forward, they’re attainable. Unlike the elusive answer to the question of how she could possibly have done something so horrendously awful to a person she’d never wanted to hurt.

When she’s forced back to school, her mother literally takes her by the hand like she’s a toddler to the car and waits in front of the building until she walks inside.

Everyone is quiet. They don’t say anything to her face; they whisper instead. She keeps her head down to all of it, stares straight ahead during class, stays to herself.

Between third and fourth period, she runs into Veronica and she’s forced to look up from her shoes. Veronica’s face is hard and her teeth are clenched so furiously that Betty can visibly count the taut lines that form on her neck. The Vixens flank her on either side.

What she’d really like is for Veronica to slap her clean across the face because, even though violence is never the answer, she is so fucking alone out on her ledge of wrongdoing that she’ll take company in any form.

But Veronica just stares at her, nostrils flaring as she breathes. She is hurt and disappointed. Absolutely furious and utterly betrayed.

 _“Move,”_ Veronica says, and Betty does.

There is no slap, no echo rings against the metal lockers. There’s no catfight in the hall. Veronica is the bigger and better person, and that’s the end of it.

A few days before prom, Archie texts her and asks her if she’d like to go with him. She doesn’t respond, so he shows up at her door. She’s so frustrated that she has to see him at all, furious with herself that she’d throw everything to the wayside for a guy who’s so oblivious to what she wants— _not to see him_ —even if he is ultimately at her door because he doesn’t want her to miss out on her senior prom. That’s what Archie says, at least.

Betty slams the door in his face. It is probably uncalled for since she is as much to blame as he is, but she does it.

On prom night, she lays in bed and watches the milestone she’s missing unfold on Instagram. Truly, she’s not upset she’s not there; there’s no reason for her to be. It’s a celebration of friendship, and she has very few friends right now. It’s a romantic time, but she’s made sure she has none of that in her life.

Veronica goes with Cheryl and Toni and a few of the other Vixens as a group. They all caption their photos with things like: _don’t know what I’d do without these ladies_ and _squad._ Archie goes with the football team. She doesn’t have a group like that—hers _was_ the Blue and Gold, and that’s out of the question for obvious reasons—but even if she did, she wouldn’t have gone.

She doesn’t know for a fact that Jughead isn’t there, but she’s almost positive he’s not. It isn’t his idea of a good time, even if he would’ve gone with her so that she could have the quintessential experience.

She checks her text messages in what she presumes is the downtime between prom and after prom, pulling up Archie’s very simple _do you want to go to prom together? I feel bad that u can’t go._ She thinks about how ironic it is that here, in those fourteen words and one letter masquerading as a word, she has exactly what she dreamed about when she was ten, twelve years old. It’s right here.

And it’s the worst thing in the world. It’s everything she doesn’t want. It’s disgusting and it makes her angry, even though she has no one to be angry with but herself.

Betty deletes the message, then she deletes Archie from her phone entirely.

She takes a minute to mourn, not because of him or any leftover feelings she might have—those don’t exist. She mourns because this night could’ve turned out so differently if she’d made a better decision. She wonders how many people in this world can say that; what percentage of the population can go _‘that’s it - that is the moment I fucked up my life.’_ Her life is not unfixable, that’s not what she’s saying. It’ll continue, and she will occupy it and force herself forward. But what should’ve been a night full of love and romance, of friendship, laughter, and a lot of fun, is not anymore because of that one moment.

They will never be friends again, none of them. She will never think back on any of them or their memories and not feel shaken with guilt. They will never get this time back, and they will never have the time in the future they might’ve had otherwise. That’s what she mourns.

She doesn’t mourn Archie in a singular sense. He is not to blame, or he is equally to blame. Still, as far as she’s concerned, she would be perfectly happy to never see him again.

She graduates and smiles. It would be wrong to ruin everyone else’s photos with her unhappy face. She takes photos with people like Ethel and Melody, who are far enough removed from the mess she’s made to not have a side. They’re so nice about everything—wishing her luck and telling her that it’ll be okay—that she feels sorry she didn’t get to know them better during her time here.

Betty spends her summer at home. Inside, away from the looks. She reads and watches TV, she sleeps. A lot. She passes the time.

And she thinks a lot, too. It’s an inevitable consequence of all the time she has to herself, holed up in her house. She thinks about how she hates everything, herself most of all, about how much she misses him, about what things she’d give up if she could have him back. It’s a hell of a lot, she realizes, but there’s no one to take what she’s willing to give.

In June, Yale sends them an email with _their_ emails, their official school emails, and other details like a portal to all their Orientation materials, their packing lists, and the password needed to access said portal. It’s the most exciting thing that has happened to her all summer, and when she reads through the email, she recognizes, in that moment, as her eyes scan through the words, that she is actually excited to go to college.

When she logs onto the portal, putting her school-issued username in for the first time and the password that’d been sent out, she gets an error message. She tries again, and again, then one more time, tapping through each letter carefully with her pointer fingers only. But it never works. She checks the Facebook group—it’s pretty obsolete now, the whole Facebook thing, but the one thing it’s good for is groups like these. On there, though, there’s no one there who seems to be having a problem, and if they are, they’re not talking about it.

Betty considers posting about it, but she’s so hesitant to brand herself as the girl who couldn’t log in to the portal before she’s met a single person in her class besides the one she royally screwed over. She considers emailing the school next, but that’s really the same issue, just dressed up differently. She doesn’t want the administrators to think she’s the dumb girl from Riverdale who can’t follow simple instructions.

There’s also not a small part of her that’s terrified to her core that if she emails the school, they’re going to send her something back along the lines of: _We’re sorry, Betty Cooper, but you’re not on our admitted students list—there’s been a mistake_. Or, _we’re sorry, Betty Cooper, we don’t accept cheaters into our school._ She’s never heard of that happening before, but it’s a wild world, the college admissions one; people fake being coxes on the crew team to get in. They fake entire lives to get in. It’s a world that cares about things like integrity and honesty and moral fiber, and the fact that she’s a cheater is a pretty outstanding demonstration of how she has none of that.

Betty works herself into a frenzy sitting there at the kitchen island, holding it together, because her mother is in the other room and she doesn’t want to know what her reaction will be if she finds out that perhaps Betty Cooper is not going to Yale after all. Even if it’s sympathy, even if it’s absolute kindness, she just doesn’t want to know.

Betty is shaking and lightheaded as she takes a blurry photo of the email Yale sent off her computer screen. The text she types out is extremely long, full of every fear she’s internalized, and an apology tacked onto every poorly constructed, frankly incoherent sentence. The gist of it is that she is beyond sorry she’s texting him, she knows she shouldn’t be, but she doesn’t quite know what else to do or who else to contact, and if he wouldn’t mind just checking his email to see if they have the same password, sorry about that, she would really appreciate it, sorry, sorry, she doesn’t know if it means she hasn’t gotten in because she can’t log in, and she’s so scared that it might mean that, she’s so sorry for unloading all this onto him, and she hopes he’s having a nice day since it’s nice outside, she’s sorry if he isn’t, and she’s sorry if this text from her has ruined it, and then she tacks on an extra sorry just because.

She is surprised when Jughead answers pretty quickly. There’s a screenshot of his email first, and then the message - _Hey. Actually, yeah, that does look wrong. This is the password I got. Try capitalizing the L._

She’s typing in the new password, breathing a little lighter, when her phone buzzes again. It surprises her so much that she slams her hands over her keyboard, making it so she has to start over.

 _Did it work?_ he asks.

She types, she hits enter, and it does. She exhales so loudly that her mother looks over.

 _Yeah_ , Betty texts back, and it feels so natural to talk to him that she forgets it’s a privilege now and that she needs to savor it. _Like a charm. Weird that happened, but thanks so much._

It’s only after she gets the closed door that is his response back— _NP_ —that she realizes how badly she’s squandered this opportunity. She doesn’t know what else she could’ve said, exactly, but there are definitely better, more profound words than the ones she’d used. At the very least, she could have said something like, she hopes that he’s having a good summer. Or that, as weird as things are between them, she’s glad that she won’t be the only person from Riverdale in New Haven.

Maybe then they could’ve talked for just a little longer.

Much later, someone is brave enough to post in the Facebook group that students with last names A through D got emails with the wrong password to the portal. There is something called a listserv, she was in the faulty one, and Yale is very sorry for the stress and confusion.

Even later than that, she’s in bed, staring at the embarrassingly lengthy message she’d sent him. It’s horribly verbose and she’s kind of shocked that such bad English could come from her own mind, even if she was in a state. She is Yale-bound and appropriately embarrassed by her workmanship.

But then she starts looking past her text, down to the ones he’d sent. She lingers. She fixates on the three words: _did it work?_ And the longer she lays there, the more she becomes the teenager she’d never been around him. They’d always been so mature until she’d gone and been thoroughly immature. She starts weighing all kinds of possibilities, and asks herself all kinds of questions. _Why would he send that if he didn’t care? Surely he’d know that she’d text him back whether or not the password worked? Why did he send it in a_ separate _message a minute later? Did it mean that he wanted to talk to her maybe, to make absolutely sure that she responded to him?_ _It_ had _to mean something._

She still has the messages they’d sent back and forth, the ones from before everything had gone wrong. The last text was from her to him, a simple _almost there!_ He’d been waiting for her at Pop’s. But a few scrolls up and it was all there—the written evidence that he’d loved her in sweet messages like _thinking about you,_ and _hungrier for you than I am this pizza,_ and _looking all kinds of fine today ;)_

And then the sweetest of all, just very simple, to the point _: I love you._

Multiple times. Everywhere. All over their written history.

Betty thinks, even though she knows that’s a slightly dangerous activity for her right now. She thinks about love and how she absolutely, definitely, and completely with every fiber of her being, still loves him. It’s a very enduring thing, love. It roots itself into a body and lasts.

She wonders if he still loves her.

She wonders if there’s anything she can do about it if he does.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realizes that these are the musings of a desperate person, sick with love and sick with guilt that she doesn’t know what to do with.

It starts innocently at first.

Then it spirals.

Near the end of the month, they get questionnaires to fill out. They’re asked questions like: _What kind of music do you listen to when you study? None? Medium? Loud?_ and _What are the most important qualities in a roommate?_

She texts him, after spending a whole day of waffling back and forth as to whether she’ll do it or not, with: _Hey! Just wanted to let you know Yale sent out roommate surveys this morning._ She adds a smiley face emoji, not the one that’s grinning widely, just the one that’s smiling with rosy cheeks. Friendly, but not too much. That’d taken her the whole afternoon to select.

Jughead responds back the next day. _Thanks, I saw._

There is no Betty and Veronica anymore to decipher what that could possibly mean, what his responding twelve hours and twenty-two minutes later tells them. She tries to play Veronica’s part, saying things like he sleeps a lot, so he might’ve gone to bed early and woken up late. He could have responded immediately in that scenario, and it’s entirely plausible.

But they were Betty and Veronica because she is Betty and Veronica is Veronica. She is not both Betty and Veronica, and she ends up talking herself in circles.

They send out meal plans next, ranging from a set number of swipes to an unlimited number—they’re allowed to pick whichever plan suits their eating habits and finances best. She texts him: _Hey! Meal plans went out. Bet I know which one you’ll go for, haha._

He responds, two days later. _Unlimited for sure._ After reading it in her voice, reading it in his voice, turning her phone upside down, analyzing what his words and punctuation could possibly mean, she clings to the fact that he could’ve ignored her, he could’ve said _yep_ or _yeah_ , something monosyllabic and cold, but he’d shared information with her. If she imagines his voice, she thinks she can even hear it as a joke.

She pushes herself into being bold, into thinking that what she’s doing is close to acceptable.

The required reading is assigned and she texts him: _Hey! Can you believe they’re giving out homework already? Good book choice though!_

He texts back a week later: _Yeah, it was pretty good._

They’re finally able to register for classes. She sends him a message saying: _So this is actually amazing. There’s literally fifteen types of English classes._

She gets back: _It’s cool_. It’s very perfunctory, but he answers in three days as opposed to a week, so maybe that’s alright.

These are the kinds of thoughts and ideas she can spin herself into these days.

Then, in early August, their dorm assignments and roommates are sent out. She texts him: _Finally got our colleges! I got Saybrook, what about you?_

He doesn’t respond.

She spends the last few weeks at home in a massive, moping funk because of it.

A week or so before she’s set to leave for Orientation, though, he texts her, and her heart starts beating so wildly she’s afraid, for a moment, she’ll stress herself into an arrhythmia.

She reads it.

_Hey, it’s Jughead. I don’t know if you’re still around, but if you are, do you think we could meet at Pop’s? Outside._

The outside part is slightly confusing, but the rest of it is so positive she easily writes it off. She texts him back: _Absolutely! Still around, only leaving on Wednesday. Is 7 good?_

He says that it is. It’s five, but she spends the rest of her time getting ready, like a teenager who knows no better.

A pretty shade of pink hangs near the bottom of the sky when she arrives at Pop’s. Jughead is already there, waiting, leaning against one of the windows and twisting his pinky with the opposite hand. Betty double-takes slightly when she sees him without his hat, before she remembers he’d thrown it away.

He is slightly tanner. A little more built, like he might’ve been working out. That amuses her a little, that not even Jughead is immune to wanting to look just a hair better than normal going into college. He’s wearing a t-shirt and jeans, his black boots, and he is exactly the same. Not hers anymore, but maybe—hopefully—that’s something they can work on.

He nods in acknowledgement and takes a few steps to meet her.

“Hey,” Betty says, and for just one dizzying moment, she’s somewhere else. Somewhere brighter and happier, but still right in front of Pop’s, and they’re just two teenagers, bashful and nervous, meeting for a first date with all the possibility in the world. “Did you want to go in or something?” she asks when he doesn’t answer.

“No, thanks.” He snaps to attention then. “I’d rather just stay out here, if that’s okay.”

Betty doesn’t think she has any right to dictate what is and isn’t okay when it comes to him, but she says that it is.

Jughead clears his throat. “I just wanted to say that I don’t want to take any of this with us. You and me, I mean.”

Betty is so shocked that her whole head juts backwards, probably very unattractively.

“Okay,” she answers slowly, processing. “What does that… I don’t know what that means.”

“It means that I’d like to leave whatever we were or are here in Riverdale.” He sighs. “I obviously can’t tell you what to do or where to be, but please,” Jughead says, “just let me start over there. I would really appreciate it if you did.”

It’s such a honest and rational ask, it’s such an _obvious_ ask, that Betty feels immediately stupid, immediately very fucking stupid for ever thinking he might’ve wanted to say anything other than just that.

Because, ultimately, nothing has changed, except maybe her ability to dream up scenarios in her head and talk herself into believing delusions.

She’s still the person who cheated on him with his best friend, and that still remains a terrible, unforgivable thing.

They will not be eating pizza in New Haven together.

They will not be anything together.

“You could’ve texted me,” she blurts out, not quite knowing why. When he looks up at her, it’s like something has fallen out of the sky and onto her head. She is a whack-a-mole, and he has knocked her halfway into the ground with just a stare.

“What?”

“About—” It’s squeaky, so she starts again. “About all this. You could’ve texted me. Or called. Why did you—”

“Because you wouldn’t leave me alone.” Jughead pauses, shaking his head. “Look, I was just trying to help you that first time with the password. You were so stressed and scared and honestly? I haven’t learned how to not react instinctively when you’re like that yet. But it wasn’t an invitation for you to keep doing it, Betty.” He sighs, like he’s so incredibly disappointed in himself. “I haven’t learned how to tell you no yet either, I guess. I shouldn’t have been answering you all summer. I didn’t want to be. I was just...” He shrugs.

“Being human,” she finishes quietly. “It’s a human instinct, being kind. Helpful.”

“I don’t know that it is,” he says, and given what she’s done, she understands why he’d think like that. “I think it’s just my instinct when it comes to you. But I can’t keep doing it, Betty. I don’t want to. I thought if you heard all this from me in person, you’d believe me more.”

Standing there, with him, hearing how badly she’d misread everything, how unwanted every part of her presence was and is to him, she feels small, and above all, so completely mortified.

“Is there something you had in mind specifically?” Betty pulls her shoulders straight. “Ignoring you if I see you or pretending I don’t know who you are?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t have the capacity right now to think of all the eventualities and solve each one. I just want to get out of here and move on, you know?”

And she does. Down to her bones, she does. She wants to get out of here faster than anything can take her, she wants the new part of her life that’s not saddled at every turn with Archie and bad decisions and bad memories to come at her as quickly as it can.

“I’ll figure it out,” Betty says. “Messaged received.”

He lingers for a moment like he’s weighing how much he believes her. Then he nods and moves for the door to Pop’s.

“Jug, wait.” He turns and looks back. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Not just about this summer, about everything. I’m just… I’m so sorry. I don’t think I could ever tell you just how sorry I am.”

He nods slowly, looking down at his shoes. He looks serious, contemplative. She imagines that Judgment Day isn’t entirely dissimilar from this.

“I know,” he says after a while. “That’s the funny thing—I know that. It’s not like I never thought about this happening before. I think it’s just human nature—when you have something that’s that important to you, you wonder about what it’d be like if it were taken from you. How it’s taken from you. The worst possible way to lose that thing. I always thought I’d never believe it when the apologies came, but I do believe you. I know you are.” His hands rise a little, then fall back to his sides with a soft slap. “I just don’t care.”

He disappears into the diner.

She believes him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All quotes in this and future chapters are from Dante’s Inferno. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! As always, I would love to hear your thoughts if you have a moment!
> 
> My personal thanks to bugggghead and her 293 meticulous comments on this chapter. I am forever in her debt.
> 
> If you want to find me on tumblr - @heavy-lies-the-crown.
> 
>  **Suggested Listening**  
>  Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen (but take your pick, it’s probably the most covered song in the world).


	2. canto ii - freshman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My eternal thanks to bugggghead for her fantastic work with this chapter.

_“There is no greater sorrow than thinking back on a happy time in misery.”_

\- Inferno, Dante, Canto V

Her roommate is from Arizona. She is very tan, not very tall, and her name is Allie. Alison Adams, but she prefers Allie. Allie is quiet, at least initially. Betty appreciates that about her. They keep offering each other the bed by the far wall; it’s definitely the better of the two. More privacy, nearer to their only window. Allie insists harder. Betty thinks they’ll get along fine.

It is effortless to become someone new here. She finds that it’s very easy to whittle a good person when all anyone wants to see is a nice, understandable surface. They’ll ask her innocuous questions like where are you from, and after a time or two of saying _Riverdale_ like that means something, she’ll say _Riverdale,_ _in upstate New York, right on the Metro-North._ They have absolutely no idea who she is and no concept of where she’s from. The town she felt big in turns out to be small at a place like this, and she is no bigger. But after having been the pariah back in upstate New York, right on the Metro-North, Betty doesn’t mind a smaller existence.

They ask her what her major is, like they’re so certain about their own, like they have it all figured out. Like they won’t be switching their own three, four times. She’ll answer _English and Psychology, I’m a double-major_ , like she won’t be, either. Which college are you in? _Saybrook._ Oh, cool, have you met so-and-so? I met her at Pre-O, she’s from California. _No, don’t think so. I’ll keep an eye out though! She sounds great!_

What they don’t ask is: _Have you cheated, Betty Cooper?_

_Is there anything you regret in your life? Do you wonder what to do with an apology that has no place to go? What does it feel like to have to carve out a home for that kind of feeling within yourself because no one wants your words? Does it eat you up? Are you a bad person, Betty Cooper?_

_What kind of person do you think you are?_

They don’t ask, so she doesn’t have to tell them. They are interested in her, but only superficially.

She makes friends easily because everyone wants to be a friend and have a friend right now. They’re all collectors—in the dining hall, on Instagram—amassing people to their tables and online pages like a form of currency. Like they’re trying to prove something. She’s not sure what, but she thinks it has something to do with normalcy. The more friends you have, the more normal you are, or something like that. She finds it very ironic that after trying so hard to prove they’re exceptional to get into this place, they’d all want to be so ordinary once they’re here.

It turns out to be easy not to see Jughead around, as easy as it is to become new. It’s a big freshman class and an ever bigger school. Even when they are moving around like kids at summer camp—dorm by dorm and twenty at a time—she doesn’t need to hide to keep herself from him.

But she thinks about him at night, when there isn’t daylight and lanyards and two truths and a lie to occupy her mind. She plays out the life she took and threw away for both of them like some kind of parallel universe, adding texture to the details. She considers things like whether or not she’d still be normal if she introduced herself to everyone as _Betty from Riverdale in upstate New York; do I know the guy you met at the dining hall, the one with the hat? He’s my boyfriend, actually! We’re here together._ That’s how she’d say it—here together. Not _attending together_ or _we both got in—here together._ She’s met a couple from Nevada that’s _here together_ , so that’s how she knows.

She thinks about specific moments as she’s living through them, wondering how each empty one might be populated if things were different. Now, as she brushes her teeth and moisturizes with no place to go but to her own bed once she’s done, she imagines that, in her other life, they’d be working out how to sneak into each others’ rooms without making their roommates uncomfortable on week one.

It’s always like this. There’s the moment she’s living in, and the one she wonders about—the other life that she’d much rather be occupying.

It’s excruciatingly painful, all the questions she’ll never have answers to, all the scenarios she imagines that will never manifest. All the pizza they’ll never eat.

That’s an especially strange fixation of hers, and she doesn’t quite understand why.

Pizza.

It’s always on her mind. It’s what she dreams about most often. She thinks maybe it’s because it’d been something _he’d_ been so excited about. It pulls her heart to either side of her body when she thinks about it, stretching it flat and thin while Allie from Arizona sleeps soundly on a lofted bed, none the wiser.

She thinks about him a lot, just simple things like what he’s wearing, what he’s doing, where he is. When she does, she has a great hatred for this place and its stupid, ancient halls and brightly manicured quads. It’s such an easy distance between her and the answers to such innocuous questions that it seems to be mocking her. He’s right there, just two buildings or a couple quads away. She doesn’t know where exactly, but he’s somewhere near. And she’s right here.

She wonders how he’s been doing and what he’s thinking about, whether she’s ever crossed his mind and stayed there for a while, or if she’s just a thought he banishes the moment she crops up. If he’d changed his mind after all, and if the fun fact he offers about himself is _I’m Jughead from Riverdale in upstate New York, and in case you’re wondering if I know the blonde girl that’s also from my town_ — _well, let me tell you. Strap in; it’s a good one. She’s a cheater, that one. No, not academically_ — _the other kind. Yeah, that kind. And with my best friend, too._

It would be a weird thing to say, and he would be weird for it, but she knows he’s never minded that.

She misses him, but that is nothing new. In the grand scheme of her life, she hasn’t been missing him long at all. It’s such a giant, consuming feeling, though, that it has the effect of destroying the other things she felt before it. It’s something like an eclipse. She misses him. She feels like she’s been missing him her entire life, and that it’s the only thing she’s ever felt.

She has Intro to European Literature on the second day of classes. She arrives early, with her syllabus and reading notes printed and in hand, and picks a center seat a few rows up. There are a few people she recognizes trailing in after her, more she doesn’t.

And then, six minutes before class starts, while she’s putting the date on the upper-right corner of her page, there’s the most familiar face of all.

With his bag slung over his shoulder and the same clothes he’s always worn, she’s somewhere else for a moment—back in Riverdale before everything went wrong, in History or English, watching as he slid into the seat next to her, lazy smile on his face and bag of chips in hand.

_Betty. Hey, Betts. Earth to my girlfriend Betty Cooper._

_Oh, don’t look at me like that, class hasn’t even started yet._

_Want one?_

_Knew you would._

But they’re here now, and when Jughead sees her, there’s no love there. She stops breathing as his gaze locks and fixes on her, and like she’s some kind of Medusa, his entire expression freezes—stony and fed up and angry.

Betty stares straight ahead at the board, inhaling in short bursts as fingers of anger claw at her. She knows there’s a lot she doesn’t get to have a say in when it comes to him anymore—she doesn’t have the right to after what she’s done. If he wants to be angry with her, then that’s it; she has no defense. There’s no explanation as to why that’s an unjustified feeling.

But this time—this _one_ time, it’s unfair.

After they’d met outside Pop’s, she’d gone straight home and done everything in her power to do what he’d asked. She’d deleted any digital trace of him and picked apart her entire schedule. Most of it was fine; it was very unlikely he’d show up in the Art History or Psych surveys. But American Lit, she thought— _possibly_. Not definitely, but possibly, so she’d switched to European Lit. It wasn’t the most traditional path, but it was a requirement for the major that she’d need to take sooner or later.

She’d heard him, and she’d listened. She’d let him start over without the blemish of her tarnishing his record. After everything, it was the least she could do.

Betty’s face heats as he shakes his head. She’d really tried, but she knows he doesn’t think so.

Jughead picks a seat in front of her—two rows down, five to the right.

She supposes that if one of them has to deal with the discomfort and distraction that is staring at the other’s head, it’s only right that it’d be her.

Her attempts to right the wrong that is not her fault don’t go much better than her initial attempt to stay out of his way.

She shows up minutes before class starts, making everyone in her row stand to let her to her seat, like she’s in the window seat on an airplane.

Except he does, too, and they awkwardly run into each other at the door.

“After you,” he says, staring down at his shoes.

Betty shakes her head. “No, you go ahead.”

Eventually, they’re both knocked into the class together by the stampede behind them that’s also nearly late, and doesn’t give a shit one way or another that they’re suspended in an awkward moment that needs to be handled delicately. They’re a messy tangle of skidding shoes and outstretched arms. Jughead stops her from falling too far, tugging on her wrist. But when she thanks him, he looks so disappointed to have touched the person who shattered his heart and used his best friend to swing the hammer that Betty wishes she’d fallen instead.

The next week, she shows up twenty minutes early so that she can be the first one into the room. He does as well. They dance around each other in the hall instead of the door, this time, halls where great thinkers and scholars have walked and thought. Betty is acutely aware of that fact as she pollutes it with the vibes of her messy personal life.

She leans on the right wall. He leans on the left. She stares down at her shoes. He does the same. But because there’s some kind of frequency they’ve both tuned into that they haven’t quite turned off yet, they keep checking on each other at exactly the same time. She’d find it heartwarming if it weren’t so heartbreaking now, that how well she knows him and he knows her is completely useless.

Eventually, Jughead leaves, pushing himself off the wall and marching away from her with purpose. He has coffee with him when she sees him next in class.

Betty gives up and shows up ten minutes before class after that, just like everyone else. He does, too. And there’s enough of a crowd waiting around them that it works.

On Halloween, she dresses up as a Spice Girl with a few of the other Saybrook girls; Allie is Posh and that’s how she’s brought in. It’s not a very inspired idea, but being included feels… like a relief. She’s been missing female companionship, she realizes, so much that she wants to snatch it up like a child would a toy when it’s offered to her. All the friends she’s made so far are perfectly nice and kind, but they’re not close yet. She’d argue that two months in, _no one_ is particularly close, but then again, there’s already a couple in her dorm. They’re social media official and everything.

So, when she’s asked if she wants to be Baby Spice—she has the hair and the face and the basically everything for it—Betty agrees wholeheartedly. She joins their group chat and value-adds with things like _‘so excited!!’_ and _‘this is going to be amazing!’_ Except, she means them. It’s fun to be around girlfriends again who actually want to be around her, to plan with them, talk about inconsequential things like hair and dresses, and whether mixing half a bag of frozen strawberries and Franzia together really counts as sangria.

Betty is helping Scary curl her hair while Sporty and Ginger sip peach vodka from plastic water bottles, chasing with Diet Cokes, when it hits her that she’s having a good time—a _really_ good one even. She’s enjoying herself and the company she’s with.

And she wonders, after everything, if it’s okay for her to feel that. How permissible is it for her to have fun when she’s saddled with this enormous amount of wrongdoing? When it’ll be okay for her to have fun again, if not now? To love again, to be happy again? There are so many people she’s hurt, and they might not be able to experience any of those things for a good, long while because of her. Is the right time for her to feel that way only after they’re able to as well? She’s incredibly determined to make the right choice—the _good_ one—but she’s not exactly sure what that is.

They’re such overwhelming, heavy questions that she has no idea how to answer with a curling iron in her hand and Scary Spice sitting below her, so Betty doesn’t try. She takes a swig from the water bottle, then another. Then one more for good measure, no chaser.

The Spice Girls _woohoo_ and shriek and tap the bottom of the bottle to encourage her to sip again. They smile at her, warmly. They scream-sing to that friendship never ends.

She thinks, _oh yes it fucking does._

They think she’s cool, Betty realizes. She fits right into the group they’ve put together.

She’s all pastel pinks and sweetness and bright smiles. She’s nice.

Like Baby Spice.

She meets a gladiator with armor plates made from Bud Light boxes at the third house they visit that night. Even though she’s almost pressed against him, pink dress nearly touching cardboard, it’s so loud that she doesn’t catch his name. It’s either Duncan or Declan. He’s a sophomore, though, that she knows. He’s inexplicably very proud of that fact. He’s brought it up three separate times.

They talk a little. He asks if she’d like to step out onto the deck since the house is heavy with the smell of sweat and bad beer, and he ends up kissing her. She kisses him back because it feels like the right thing to do. It feels like it might be the manifestation of moving on, and to her, that seems right.

It is drunk and very sloppy. Betty doesn’t enjoy it. He’s overly enthusiastic with his tongue, and all she can think about is how much she deserves this bad kiss. She had someone who kissed her sweetly, and she felt loved when he did. It’s her fault she doesn’t have that anymore, so she allows the gladiator’s tongue to dart in and out of her mouth and, for some reason, lick the inside of her cheek. She thinks, vindictively, about how he shouldn’t be so proud of the fact he’s a sophomore if that’s how he kisses, about the crick in her neck she’s going to have from him bending her back too far. She thinks about anything and everything that comes to mind so she won’t have to think about who she’d rather be kissing.

When he’s done, quite literally exploring the insides of her mouth with the perseverance of her dentist, the gladiator says, “You definitely have some spice, Baby Spice.”

Her immediate thought: _This is the worst fucking line I’ve ever heard._

The gladiator puts his number into her phone when it’s time for her to move on to the fourth house. It’s like trick or treating, but for the college-minded. Allie knows someone from her Acapella group who says that there’s a party somewhere on Wooster that’s pretty lit, which means that there’s half a room-temperature keg still going. Betty walks off with her phone and thinks she might as well be hefting around a sack of bricks.

It feels like cheating again. The kiss, the number, all of it. It’s not anymore. But she feels as dirty and as slimy, as thoroughly disgusting and prickly, as when she’d left Archie’s garage. She feels like going back to her room and showering, but she can’t abandon the Spice Girls. They need her for aesthetic’s sake. Moreover, they actually want her around, and she is so… She’s been so _completely lonely,_ with only her guilt and conscience for company, that a potential return to that state stops her from running back to her room. It makes her realize, in that moment, just how important human companionship is, and how much she doesn’t want to be without it again.

Betty deletes the gladiator’s number on the way to the fourth house.

His name was Dexter, Betty notices, as his digital footprint disappears. Dexter Howarsdf, but she thinks he’d probably meant Howard.

In the early morning hours of the first of November, she strips a pink dress off her body, lets down both of her ponytails, and becomes Betty Cooper again. While she stands, drunkenly and unsteadily under the hottest water available in the dorms, she decides that she will not be kissing anyone else.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that she just doesn't want to. It feels disingenuous. She’s hung up on someone else, still full-blown in love with him, and acting in a way that’s contrary to how she feels doesn’t seem like the virtuous way to be.

It doesn’t sound like how a good person would behave.

She thinks a lot about redemption in November.

It distracts her sometimes while she’s in class—all her classes—but especially during European Lit, when her eyes often wander to his head, and she’ll wonder where redemption comes from. Him? Some larger, unseen source? Or from somewhere within herself?

Or, some combination of A, B, and C?

Betty knows that redemption isn’t a given—it has to be worked for. Sought out—it won’t fall into her lap naturally like the apple did on Newton’s head. She doesn’t know if redemption even exists, but if it does, she doesn’t think it’s accessible or available to everyone. There are certain things, certain actions, bad enough to render someone irredeemable.

Like killing someone in cold blood.

Like cheating on someone you love? Like causing people who’ve only ever shown you kindness, pain when you betray them so badly?

She wonders. She sits there in European Lit with the _Divine Comedy_ open at her tiny desk, shaking as they pick apart the _Inferno_. They visit each of the Nine Circles in excruciating detail, bandying around words like sin and evil and judgment. They discuss Cleopatra’s and Helen of Troy’s descent into Hell, and the stories that were painted as romantic to her Shakespeare survey class, in high school World History, assume a sinister flip-side.

She’s chilled to the bone when she realizes her own actions have landed her at least in the Second Circle of Hell, if not the Ninth. There’s so much room for her in Hell and so many places she could fit in. It’s such a terrifying thought, that something she’s done is bad enough to land her in Hell, that she sometimes doesn’t even look at Jughead all class.

Sometimes.

So she sits there, and she wonders. How she makes it better for those she’s wronged? How she makes it better for herself?

Presumably, she goes to the Harvard-Yale game. Betty doesn’t remember it, but Allie has pictures of her at the stadium, looking surprisingly put-together for how completely gone she’d been. She’s earned herself a new nickname, too. Now, she’s “Coops'' to everyone. She doesn’t mind it. She’s had better nicknames, but she kind of likes it, even. Betty doesn’t remember how it’d been bestowed on her, though, just that Everclear had been involved.

“Baby’s first blackout,” Allie says affectionately the day after, rolling a bottle of blue Gatorade across the room.

Allie asks her one night, very casually, if she knows someone named Jughead Jones. Betty is writing a response paper, midway through typing the word _‘enlightenment.’_

After the question, it comes out as ‘ _enlightkldjf._ ’

“Why?” Betty clears her throat. “Why’d you ask, I mean.”

Allie shrugs. “No reason. I met him at Pepe’s earlier; he was behind me in line. He said he’s from Riverdale too, so I just wondered if you knew him.”

Her mind leaps and vaults like a gymnast to the worst possible scenario, and there’s a moment she thinks she’s actually going to be sick all over her computer—that’s what the idea of Jughead and Allie together does to her body. She’s lightheaded as she begins swallowing rapidly and wondering where she’ll sleep if they come to her room to hook up. This is college, and people have sex in college. They have a lot of sex. At least, that’s what she’s heard, even if she isn’t actively participating in the grand tradition.

Betty knows she deserves to feel the brunt of what she’s done, but even this is too much—Jughead having sex with her roommate while she waits in the common room for them to finish. Spending the night in her room with someone who isn’t her. Dating her roommate. There isn’t enough space within her one body to process how terrible it would feel. She wouldn’t survive it.

But she remembers that none of this is about what Betty Cooper thinks Betty Cooper can handle—it’s about what the universe has in store for her after all this. This is her karmic retribution, her penance, and those would be insanely stupid concepts if she were allowed to mete it out for herself.

Allie knows she has an ex-boyfriend in a very casual, _‘yeah I dated in high school, it didn’t work out’_ kind of way. It’s one of the topics they’d randomly happened on the day after Halloween, when she’d teased Allie about not coming back to their room the night before.

“It sucked, didn’t it?” Allie had asked after spilling the details about the Shaggy Rogers she’d hooked up with; Scooby wasn’t involved, it wasn’t a threesome. “The whole break-up thing. He was my first boyfriend.”

Correcting _‘sucked’_ to ‘ _I honestly thought I was going to die and sometimes I still do, from the guilt, from missing him while he’s right there in English class, from this love that wants so badly to escape and run away to him’_ seemed a bit too intense when Allie hadn’t really asked for specifics.

Instead, Betty had gone with, “Yeah, it sucked. Majorly.”

She assumes that Allie thinks things hadn’t worked out between her and Jughead because of college. That’s why Allie had broken up with her high-school boyfriend—distance, the inevitability of the excitement and draw of meeting new people, new _horny_ people, mutually respecting that reality and not drawing it out until turkey-drop season. It’s a more common, more normal story than cheating on her boyfriend with their mutual best friend, and winding up at the same school together.

Betty considers owning up to being Jughead’s ex-girlfriend; maybe Allie would respect the girl-code and not go after him if she knew. But she realizes, very acutely, how wrong it would be to get in the way of his personal life like that. As far as she knows, there’s no one here that knows who they were to each other. He’s a colorful detail in spaces only she can access. He’s completely erased from her social media, but still in the photos she keeps on her phone. He’s never in anything she reveals about herself, absent from every answer she gives about who she is and where she’s from, but he’s always there in her mind, a permanent resident who’s moved in, stretched out, and made himself comfortable. He’s a secret she doesn’t want to keep but that she protects regardless. It’s what she owes him, after everything, and it’s the right thing to do.

“I mean, maybe the name’s a little familiar?” she ventures, carefully fishing for the lead he’d cast. She shrugs for extra casualness but Allie’s looking at her laundry. “It’s not like it’s super forgettable. Did he say anything?”

“Pretty much the same as what you just said.” Allie stacks a Yale v-neck atop her pile of folded t-shirts. “I told him you were my roommate, but he said he didn’t remember you.”

Her heart crunches, gives out, and it just _hurts_ everywhere, throughout her body, like a white-hot pain. Even though she hadn’t expected him to say anything different, even though she knows he hasn’t really forgotten her, pain isn’t rational like that, it just arrives when it does.

“Makes sense.” Betty tries to keep her voice steady, but she’s not sure she succeeds. “It was a big school. Doubtful we even crossed paths.”

The atmosphere changes after Thanksgiving. There’s always been an undercurrent of competitiveness here, it’s built into the foundations, but it becomes frenetic and agitated as the semester draws to an end.

Betty doesn’t mind this new energy. The prospect of her first set of finals instills a healthy dose of fear in her, and they temporarily consume the majority of space in her mind. She’s almost grateful for it, in a way, but she’s not about to start telling people she’s excited for finals. That would be, she recognizes, weird, and on par with the kids who say things like _Yale was my safety school!_ at every chance they get.

She’s in the reading room of the library the night—the few hours, really—before her paper for European Lit is due when she sees him.

Jughead is on edge, and she knows, because she knows him, that it has nothing to do with the fact that it’s four in the morning. He’s walking through the lines of tables with purpose, striding all the way up to the circulation desk. Betty watches him, smashing her keyboard with nonsense words to make it look like she isn’t. His shoulders fall after a while, and he checks his watch before stalking off with his mouth held in a taut line.

She doesn’t need to know him to know whatever book he’d wanted from the reserves is currently unavailable.

When he walks by her table, Betty leans forward so far that her nose nearly touches her computer. She quickly deletes the gibberish she’d been typing on the off chance he happens to glance back at her screen. There’s a faint murmur of indistinct noise floating around her since they’re allowed to have quiet conversations in this particular room. Still, she’s able to hone in on the sound of his shuffling feet and how they pause just slightly when he passes her.

How they stop entirely and double-back when he’s just about two rows past.

Jughead stands across from her, both hands wrapped around the chair in front of him. She’s not quite breathing right. Betty knows exactly why he’s there—exactly which book of hers he’s interested in—but logical, reasoned thoughts like that don’t have much of a place anywhere when it’s actually him there in front of her after so long.

“Hey,” he says. It isn’t a happy _‘hey,’_ but it’s not filled with hate, either.

Betty doesn’t know what kind of response is right for the situation. Maybe the surprised, _‘I totally wasn’t watching you and absolutely have no idea what book you’d want from me right now’_ hey, or the _‘sorry, who are you again?’_ hey.

Betty looks up at him. “Hey,” she goes with, the one that’s most honest. Familiar and warm just from hearing his voice after imagining it for so long. The loving kind of hey.

But if it is lost on him, she can’t tell.

“So I, uh, left my copy of the Anthology back at the trailer over Thanksgiving.” Jughead gestures down to her open book like she hasn’t been reading from it all semester, too. “Can I borrow yours when you’re done?

“Oh!” Betty is so rattled to be talking to him—actually _talking to him_ again—that she snaps the book shut without even marking her page. “Sure. Yeah, totally.” She pushes the Anthology to him. “Absolutely. You can take it.”

His eyes narrow in confusion. “Aren’t you working on it?”

 _Yes_.

Betty shrugs noncommittally. “I can do it later.”

“It’s due in seven hours.”

“I know.”

“So… Don’t you need this?”

Even though he’s only telling her truthful things, and she doesn’t have any right to be frustrated with him about anything since she has no legs to stand on where he’s concerned, she is anyway. Just slightly—a little at him, a little at the situation. She’s trying to do the right thing, and fighting to have to do it is exasperating.

“Okay,” Betty answers, as diplomatically as possible. “You can borrow it when I’m done, then. Or, you know, whatever you want.”

Jughead sighs, rolling his hands over the top of the chair he’s holding onto. It reminds her of how he’d turn the throttle on his bike, but she knows how red thinking of him like that will make her, so she thinks about other hot things.

Like Hell.

Like the barbed, fiery gates leading into the Inferno; like the many Circles calling her name, carving out a spot for her.

“Can I sit here for a bit and share it with you?” Jughead asks eventually. “I just need to add a few more quotes.”

Of all the outcomes possible, that hadn’t been the one she’d expected. It floors her so much that she just stares up at him and blinks.

“Or not…”

“Sorry,” Betty says quickly. “Zoned out for a moment. No, yeah, that’s completely fine. You can move my stuff if you’d rather have that chair. Or if you want to sit next to me, I can move all this, too.”

He takes the seat that’s diagonally across from her, the farthest one away. The strap of his bag slides off his shoulder as he sits and clears this throat. “This one’s fine.”

They sit in silence for twenty-four minutes. Betty gets absolutely nothing done in that time, but she types out random lines and passages from the book and runs her finger carefully over the text, so at least it looks like she does.

She hopes.

At minute twenty-five, Jughead asks her, out of the blue, “Was that _‘when reason fails, the devil helps’_ quote from _Crime and Punishment_ or Dante?”

It hits her then that at least in European Lit, it’s been a very meta semester. And not one that’s been particularly helpful for her mental state.

“It’s um— _Crime and Punishment_.” Betty mumbles the title. “I have it if you need—”

“I have mine. It’s just the Anthology I left.”

“Oh.” Betty watches as he flips back and forth through the book, growing increasingly frustrated the longer it takes to find the page. “It’s on ninety-eight.”

Jughead looks up at her, which she doesn’t know quite what to do with. She knows his trust in her right now is subterranean, but there’s really no reason for her to lie about a page number.

“Very Rain Man of you,” he says eventually.

“I used it in mine, too.”

“Yikes.” He shakes his head once to himself and makes a slight clicking sound. Even though he’s looking at his screen, Betty snaps to attention. “I’m not the original I thought I was,” he finishes.

Is he… _joking_ with her?

It’s how she remembers it: wry half-smile, deadpan voice. So she goes with it.

“I mean, when the paper topic is to extrapolate on one of the major themes from the readings, and you’ve spent half the semester discussing Hell and morality, you’d be a real idiot not to use that quote.”

Jughead laughs, just slightly. “Glad to know I’m not an idiot in your book, then.”

“Unless you were the one who put eviction notices on all the doors in Durfree on Halloween and made the police come out, then no.”

He looks up and the corner of his mouth quirks slightly.

“You didn’t,” she says.

“Could’ve.”

“You did not.”

“The concept of eviction can be interpreted in so many ways, and—”

“Jug!”

“Nah,” he says easily. “I didn’t.” He leans forward, conspiratorial-like, and tilts his head, inviting her to come closer. “I know who did, though.”

Betty folds her arms on top of the Anthology. “You’re not allowed to use this until you tell me.”

He looks at her and raises an eyebrow before reaching over and wiggling the book slightly out of her grasp. Betty falters for a moment before doubling her weight on it. It goes on like that, and she’s vaguely aware that they’re both smiling, before his chair scratches against the floor and eyes fall on them.

“Sorry,” Betty whispers, looking out around her and making her best apologetic face.

Jughead leans even closer. “It’s some guy named Tadpole. Heard he might be suspended for it. First name also starts with a T. It’s... damn what was it? Ted or Timmy or—”

“Wait, _Theo?_ ”

Jughead snaps and points at her. He’s grinning. “That’s the guy.”

“ _Theo Tadpole?_ ”

“Dumb name, right? I know—pot, kettle, but still.”

“Theo Tadpole,” Betty repeats. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah. Friend of yours?”

“No, but my roommate knows him.” She’s talking quickly through her excitement, words falling from her mouth before she has a chance to think them through. “You know her, Allie Adams? She said she met you at Pepe’s once. Tadpole’s her lab partner. She’s going to have a conniption when she hears this _._ We’ve literally been trying to solve this for a month. She hasn’t stopped talking about it.”

The words _‘you’ll never believe’_ are typed out in all caps when Betty feels the mood shift entirely. It’s like ice-water has just been dumped over her head. Her thumbs hover over her phone as she quickly analyzes the past thirty seconds, before remembering the topic of her roommate in general was probably one she should’ve stayed away from.

 _Well, fuck_ , she thinks as Jughead pins himself back against the chair.

“About that…” His voice is stilted. “I… sorry. She caught me off-guard and I thought that, with everything, all the you and me stuff, it’d be easier if—”

“I get it,” Betty interrupts. “No hard feelings.” She smiles, but she’s always been lousy at selling false sincerity.

He’s intensely focused after that, hunching so far over his screen that she can barely see him. She’s furious with herself for single-handedly blowing up the conversation. It’s like he remembered himself, after a moment of forgetting everything, remembered who she is and where they stand, too.

A second set of twenty-five minutes pass silently, then two more, before Jughead abruptly shuts his computer. He pushes the Anthology they’d been keeping dead center to her side.

“All yours,” he says. “I’m good to go.”

A panicked sort of desperation claws at her as he packs away his things, the sister to the desolate feeling that made her physically grab onto him back in her bedroom months ago just to convince him to stay for a few more seconds.

In her head, it sounds like _say something. Say something, say something, saysomething, you giant dum-dum._

But these are the moments. The reckoning ones. The ones that really test her mettle to see what her word is worth. All the things she’s promised, all the good she’ll do and be, are entirely empty sentiments if she doesn’t have the ability to follow through.

So, she stays silent, just watching as he puts his jacket on and slings his bag over his shoulders.

He’s halfway out of his chair before he pauses, hovers for a moment, and sits back down. “Hey, um… What are you taking next semester?”

“Oh.” She supposes it’s good that one of them covers the bases. “Yeah, good call. Let me just pull up my… I have English Poetry, Milton and Blake, Abnormal Psych, and Social Psych. Oh, and Emerson, Dickinson, and Melville.”

“Damn.” Jughead sounds surprised. But with the way he’s concentrating, like he’s committing her schedule to memory, Betty knows he’s not still hanging around to make sure she’s aware he’s moderately impressed with her course load.

“If there’s stuff you need to take that I’m in, we can figure out who should do it first. I think Social Psych is the only class I have to take next semester since Miller’s going on sabbatical, but the rest can be moved around.”

His eyes narrow. “Sorry, what about Social Psych?”

“Our classes,” she corrects. “I figured you wouldn’t want to end up running into each other like this again, so we can coordinate around it if you want.”

Confusion leaves his face as he catches on. “That’s not—you don’t need to switch classes because of me. Don’t let…” Jughead clears his throat. “Don’t let what happened between us get in the way of your school and stuff. That wasn’t why I was asking.” Betty remembers then that he’s about as good at lying as she is at fake smiling. “I was just curious. Do what you need to do.”

He stands and tucks his hands into his pockets. “Thanks for sharing the book.”

When he’s not there, she puts him into the empty seats, the side of the bed, the cold places beside her, imagining what their life here would be like if he weren’t a hidden, ghostly figure in her mind. He’s here now, tangible and real, and so much better than the pieces her mind can jigsaw together.

And for a moment, all she can feel is blinding jealousy. There’s a version of her in some other universe, there’s a woman out there in hers that he’ll date one day, who’ll both get to stand up from this table and not have to watch while he walks away. That person gets to wander back to his room with him, make ramen noodles at five in the morning, and pass a stolen bowl from the dining hall back and forth on a twin bed. She gets to wish him luck on his finals with a peck on the cheek and a hug, and she’ll get to draw him to her and tell him she’s proud of him before kissing him senselessly to show him just how much.

That other her, that other woman—the one that gets to celebrate and study and complain about finals and be tired with him and just _be_ with him—the one that knows the good thing that she has before it’s too late—

She is so enormously lucky.

“Good luck with everything,” Jughead says. He pauses as he passes her. There’s a heavy beat before he adds a little more sincerely and more fondly, a little more quietly, “I’m sure you’ll give your finals hell.”

Betty twists to smile up at him. It’s watery and unsteady. “You will, too,” she whispers. “All nine circles of it.”

She spends a good deal of her winter break doing two things: checking if her grades have been posted, and reverting to her teenage incarnation again. She turns Jughead’s words over in her mind and wonders if he’d been telling her the truth.

She goes back and forth a lot. Some days, like the one where she gets a B in goddamn _Intro_ to Art History—which she’d taken just for fun, and is now in a foul mood because of it—she’s sure he was just being nice and that he’d switched out of any and all classes they might’ve had in common the first chance he got.

Other days, like the one she gets an A- in European Lit, but a comment on her paper that reads, _‘well presented overall, but slightly shaky on discussion of morality on pgs. five + six,’_ she’s more inclined to believe him.

Of the two of them, she’s the untrustworthy one.

She’s the one that’s shaky on her morality.

But she’s hopeful, even when she’s not trying to be. It’s the season, it’s the Hallmark movies her mother polishes off two bottles of wine and gin on the rocks in front of, and it’s plain old Betty Cooper, grasping onto straws she knows are too short to hold.

The first week back, Betty watches the door during each one of her classes, tilted so far forward that the edge of the desk presses into her ribs.

He isn’t in any of them.

There are times she wakes in the dead of the night, always between three and four in the morning. It’s a shocking kind of wakefulness, all straight spines and gasping breaths. It’s not at all pleasant. Betty has calculated, and given her general bedtime, she should be stuck in the middle of a REM cycle.

She has her theories for why she keeps waking up like this. Sometimes, she dreams that she’s back in that garage with Archie, and knowing what she knows now, reasoning and thinking with a heartbeat more of clarity than she did even while suspended in the middle of sleep, she wrenches herself from the situation and saves herself. Sometimes, she thinks she’s unconsciously aware that at her most vulnerable, the person she’d like to be there with her, isn’t. Sometimes, she assumes she just misses him, far too much to sleep through such a painful and uncomfortable feeling.

She joins the _Daily News_ in March and makes a hat out of newspaper in under three minutes.

It’s a combination of things that lead her back to the paper. Her grades hadn’t been perfect last semester, but she’s feeling comfortable with her workload now, like she’s really getting the hang of this whole college thing. She has friends, but they’re all mostly from her dorm, and she knows the importance of diversifying her social circle. Dorms change, and friends do, too. And, it’s a great resume booster, even better experience.

And, above all, she realizes Jughead was right. It’s a privilege to be here, and she only gets that privilege for four years. These resources, these opportunities—they’re not infinite or everlasting. She _wants_ to be a part of the newspaper. She _wants_ to write again, to be on a beat, and squandering the chance to do it at one of the best places she could is a monumental waste. That’s not who she is. She’s Betty Cooper, and she takes advantage of things.

So she sucks it up, sends out an email with clips attached, and starts mentally drafting her _‘this is how we’re going to work around each other’_ if he’s on staff, too. It’s daunting, the prospect that she might be invading his space when he doesn’t want her to be in it. She’s always been aware of her own presence and what kind of behavior is appropriate for each situation.

But it also feels good to take charge of her life like this; she feels more like herself when she does.

The speech goes unused but she gets a byline.

She doesn’t want to be forgetting him, but admittedly, it’s easier to put him out of her mind when he isn’t literally sitting in front of her in class. Jughead becomes something like a ghost or an imaginary friend to her, blurred around the edges and hazy in shape. She hates how completely pathetic that is, but at least no one else knows about it. He’s still there at times, in snarky commentary she hears in her head, in the space beside her in her tiny bed, in the half-second she lingers between asleep and awake. But he’s losing definition now, becoming less of himself and fading more as the days pass.

The guilt goes with him a little, too. Betty doesn’t know how she feels about that. It’s good in a way, having less of it on her shoulders—it lets her live a freer existence. She can feel herself laughing more and truly enjoying things instead of putting on fronts to make it look like she is. She goes out, more than she did the first semester, wandering around with Allie to all kinds of sweaty, grimy parties that they end up becoming sweaty, grimy, and drunk at, themselves. They go to Toads on Wednesday, a good several times, and it’s simultaneously downright horrible and completely glorious.

It unsettles her too, though, the way the guilt fades. Betty knows she hasn’t earned the right for it to disappear like this when all she’s done is put time between herself and the horrible incident. It’s not her intention to ignore or mishandle it. But the guilt ebbs regardless, just like Jughead does in her mind, and she accepts there’s nothing much she can do to bring either of them back.

A few weeks after joining the _Daily News_ , Betty sees his byline in _The Record_ while she’s idly flipping through it between classes. It’s unexpected, and she goes through a comical, cliched moment where she draws the magazine up to her face and shakes it out a little as she checks if it’s really him.

Betty laughs when she reads his piece, runs her finger over the letters of his name, the same way she wants to run it over his cheek, and takes a moment just to feel. How proud she is of him, how good she thinks it is, how much she still wishes things could’ve been different, how much she still thinks about him and her and pizza in Connecticut, how much she misses his writing. How incredibly much she misses him. She lets it seep into her bloodstream, every ounce of feeling she’s carrying, in case she’s wrong about things like transmittance or divine energy, and he can actually feel what she’s feeling if she concentrates hard enough.

Then, with a deep breath, she puts the magazine back on the rack and leaves for class.

It’s spring suddenly, and the quads fill with frisbees and blankets and many, many sunburns. Betty thinks that it’d be a real waste if Yale didn’t get a couple of photographers out and about for their next round of brochures. As a group, they enjoy that for about a half a hot minute before it’s finals and they’re ushered back inside.

She feels more confident this time around. Still nervous, but less so since she knows what to expect, and knows she isn’t masquerading as an imposter who doesn’t deserve to be here. She’s also not taking any Art History classes this semester.

And then it’s over, just like that. Her freshman year. It ends both dramatically and practically. She sells her books back to the bookstore for literal pennies, but hangs onto _The_ _Divine Comedy_ for future reference. She indulges Allie while she drunk-cries about how much she’ll miss her, even though they’re sticking together as roommates. As they stuff their clothes into suitcases they’d stashed under their beds, everyone gets completely hammered from the last fingers of alcohol and warm mixers they’ve hidden at the bottom of their underwear drawers, mixed together in a crockpot. It happens to be the most disgusting concoction Betty has had all year, and she’s had beer with literal dirt and dust from pong balls floating in it.

Her mother arrives a couple days after her finals to pick her up and makes only a handful of comments about the freshman fifteen and how Betty has mostly beat it. Betty thinks that’s her mother’s way of saying she’s missed her.

She’d been planning to take a walk around campus before leaving, just for memory’s sake, and Betty figures that doing it while her mother argues with her RA about some deposit is as good a time as any.

Betty inhales deeply, smelling the faintness of summer; it’s there in the wind, but it hasn’t yet landed and taken root onto the grass yet. She’ll miss this place, she realizes. There’s a lot about her that hasn’t changed. She’s still Betty Cooper, and she’s still a cheater—that’s all the same. But she feels a little smarter now, a little wiser. More independent, and all that’s been brought on, at least in part, by her being here.

 _It’s good_ , she thinks. _It’s good enough for now._

She’s on her way back to her room when she sees Jughead, empty duffle bag slung over his shoulder. He’s holding the door open for a group wheeling a standing glass globe that’s so large, she’s sure it’s against their fire code, out on a dolly.

Betty looks around quickly, before leaning against a nearby tree to watch the scene unfold. There are two guys who look like spotting the globe is the closest they’ve come to playing a sport in their lives, another two carefully eeking the dolly out the building.

They almost have it, too, until the wheels bump hard over the door’s ridge and the globe topples and shatters.

Betty laughs. _Loud_. She knows it isn’t right of her, but it’s not one of those things she can control. She looks over at Jughead doing absolutely nothing to help, smiling down at the kids maniacally waving people away from the glass mess, then laughs even more when she hears in her mind, exactly what he’d say if he were next to her—

_That’s what you get for being such pretentious fuckers._

Jughead disappears into the dorm, still smirking away at the commotion, and Betty thinks, a little sadly, that there’s a great irony in the fact he’d been so close to her all year—in the building just behind hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Toads is, apparently, the kind of god-awful (and lbr, glorious, when you’re eighteen) hotspot Yale kids flock to on Wednesday’s to make terrible drunken, but (probably) memorable, decisions. The _Record_ is Yale’s humor magazine. The _Daily News_ is Yale’s student newspaper, the oldest college paper daily in the country.
> 
> Next up - Adam. He speaketh. 
> 
> **  
> **Archie Comics Characters Roundup (from Wikipedia)****  
> 
> 
> Alison “Allie” Adams (Betty’s roommate and friend) - an early 2000’s character who “belonged to the same science club as Dilton.”
> 
> Dexter Howard (the gladiator) - an ‘80s-early ‘90’s “college-aged freshman introduced as a potential love interest for Betty.” 
> 
> Theo Tadpole (the evictor) - an ‘40s-’60’s character, an “early concept for Dilton.”


	3. canto iii - sophomore, part i

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My deepest thanks to bugggghead for her encouragement and thoughtful edits.

_“As in autumn the leaves fall off one after the other, till the bough sees all its spoils upon the earth, in like wise the evil seed of Adam throw themselves from that shore one by one at signals, as the bird at his call.”_

\- Inferno, Dante, Canto III

She meets Adam before her sophomore year even officially begins. He’s nice, a Political Science major. He volunteers at Orientation, like she does; they’re both assigned to hand out school IDs. Adam passes her lanyards and she attaches them to plastic card holders. He jokes about how she looks like the kind of girl who’d wear one well into second semester unironically, and Betty laughs a little.

“I figured I had about a fifty-fifty chance of you either finding that funny, or not talking to me for the rest of the day,” he says.

She raises an eyebrow. “Risky odds, no?”

Adam shrugs. He is very polished, very Vineyard Vines and silver spoon, all of which would normally turn her off. But there is something endearing in the way he looks at her, and it lends him a level of authenticity.

“I’ll try something safer, then.” He smiles. “How was your summer?”

“Not too bad. I did an internship with a law office down in Stamford.”

Adam nods in between a very serious _don’t take off your lanyard_ order to a freshman. “What kind?”

Betty frowns. “The… small kind?”

“I meant what kind of law,” Adam corrects, laughing lightly. “Securities? Antitrust?”

“ _Oh_. Personal injury. Car accidents, mostly; a couple slip-and-falls.”

“Cool, cool.” Betty’s not quite sure she believes him, though, given his initial guesses. “What’cha think?”

“I loved it, actually.” It’s the truth, which had surprised her. “The work was super interesting. It’s just not quite for me.”

What she means is _there are bad guys for me to catch out there._ It is difficult, though, vocalizing that him. She’s worried she might sound juvenile, like she might as well be saying she wants to be _the President_ or _an astronaut-princess-ballerina_.

But Adam simply smiles. “Good for you. Take it from me, there’s way more interesting stuff to do out there.”

Betty hands Anita Chavita her ID and directs her toward Old Campus. “Yeah? So what’re you going to be, then?”

And with a great sigh, Adam tells her, “A lawyer.”

Betty laughs. She laughs so freely this time that she snorts.

“Family business, unfortunately,” Adam continues. “The deep-seated, generational kind.”

Betty finds quickly that she likes him. It is an exciting realization. Those haven’t been emotions in her headspace for some time now, and she thought she might’ve indefinitely broken her ability to access them. So, when Adam asks her if she’d like to grab dinner after they’ve changed out of their boxy Orientation staff t-shirts, Betty says yes, and genuinely means it.

Yes, she would really like to.

She expects they’ll wander to one of the popular, budget-friendly hotspots near campus, but when she meets Adam outside her building, he is wearing a button up and slacks, putting her little sundress and sandals to shame.

“I can change,” Betty stammers immediately, but Adam waves his hand.

“Nonsense,” he replies. “You look perfect.”

Adam takes her to Union, the wine bar where her mother had gotten so sloshed that Betty had to drive herself home at the beginning of summer. He orders a bottle of Chardonnay with the air of the twenty-one year old he’s not and with a knowledge of vintages she doesn’t have.

When their waiter leaves, he leans over and whispers, “It’s more about confidence than anything.”

Betty leans in, too. “Oh, is that all?”

“That and finding those who’ll look out for you when you’re desperately trying to impress the lovely lady you’re with.”

Adam smiles, brighter than sunshine, and her heart—it flutters, a little.

After the dinner Adam insists on paying for—steak for him, salmon with an incredible herb crust for her, and another bottle of wine, just because—he walks her home. Head hazy with wine, it dawns on Betty that she’s just been on her first date of the mature variety, and there is something exciting in the realization that she might be ready, and old enough now, to have these kinds of experiences.

At her door—to her room, not her building—Adam asks very politely if he can kiss her goodnight. Betty smiles. She answers that it is.

He puts his hands on her upper arms as he presses his lips to hers. It lasts just a few seconds—no tongue, nothing too firm, very sweet.

And to her surprise, it doesn’t feel like cheating.

It feels nice.

She has dinner with Adam a few more times at restaurants with wine lists he confidently orders from, and goes to his room to watch a movie after Spanish food at Olea. He kisses her before they’re even past the credits, and her top is off not long after that. But when his hand drifts to her bra clasp, Betty jerks away.

“I’m sorry,” Adam says quickly. “I’m sorry. That was too fast, I know.”

“Just a little,” she answers. “I like you, though. That’s not what this is about.”

“You don’t need to explain.”

But she thinks she wants to. “I… went through a very bad breakup.” Betty says. “And I need to go slower because of it.”

Adam nods. “As slow as you want.”

Still, Betty leaves without finishing the movie, carrying every strange feeling she doesn’t know how to reconcile with her. She likes Adam, truly. She is sexually attracted to him, and he’s the first person she’s met after Jughead she can honestly say that about.

It’s simply that Jughead is still unresolved to her.

Betty thinks that will never change. He’s a what-if she’ll always wonder about. He’s a lot in her heart that’s been permanently built on and that she can never bulldoze away, a reserved table she can never take the sign off.

But maybe that’s okay.

There will always be strands in her life she has no choice but to leave undone. Life is inherently messy like that, especially when her loose ends don’t completely belong to her.

Jughead has gone on with his life, walked far ahead of her, and wandered down a path she can’t navigate or see anymore. There’s no room for her on it. She cannot call him back, she cannot catch up. She can think about the one they might have shared together, unpack the memories and details of him she has stored in her mind every now and then, wish that things could’ve been different—but corporeally, they’ve parted ways long ago. He’s moved on, and she’s—

Betty takes in a breath.

She’s ready to move on, too.

Betty retraces her steps back to Adam’s dorm and knocks on his door. He’s surprised for a moment before he smiles down at her.

“What happened to slow?” he asks.

“It’s still there,” Betty says. “But I’d like to finish the movie with you, if that’s okay.”

“That’s okay.”

“And I’d like to finish that kiss as well.”

Adam smiles a very bright, all-American smile. “That’s okay, too.”

She becomes Adam’s girlfriend with very little fanfare. It is a contrary process to what she’s heard is typical for college relationships; he does not ask if she is okay with something casual and undefined after they’ve been having sex for a month.

Instead, after a few more movie nights, she has sex with Adam. It is slightly awkward—he accidentally flattens her hair, she knocks her forehead into his—but after building up the concept of the person she’d have sex with after Jughead, that she enjoys it, enjoys _Adam_ , is a win in her book.

The next day, Adam asks her, very sweetly and first thing when she wakes up, if she would like to be his girlfriend; they can go at her pace, but he likes her very much, in every way possible there exists to like someone. Betty says yes, she’d like that, because she likes him, too. Maybe not very much yet, maybe not in the infinite ways he seems to like her, but as far as she knows, an equal amount of like has never been a requirement for entering into a relationship.

Adam sits across from her at the library and surprises her after classes with coffee.

He calls her Betts one day, and when she tells him she isn’t comfortable with that, he drops it with understanding and without question. He goes with Coops instead, even though everyone else also does; Adam nicknames the important people in his life, and he wants to call her something special, too.

He meets her friends.

She’s assigned the crime and legal issues beat on the _News_ , which amuses him to no end, but he listens intently as she talks about article ideas and slants, regardless.

And it’s nice. It’s nice to be someone’s girlfriend again. Nice to have someone to talk to. Nice to have someone who cares about her, someone who she could come to love.

It rains on his twentieth birthday.

She hopes that despite the bad weather, he’s having a good day.

Sex with Adam is different. It is not bad. Her best description is pleasant. It doesn’t dawn on her why that might be until he actually asks, or comments, that he has never made her come during sex.

Her verbal reaction is a slightly surprised _“Oh!”_

Mentally, she is not, in fact, that surprised; it simply hasn’t bothered her much. She is not the kind of person, she’s discovering, who needs to finish to feel sexually gratified, although it’s definitely a plus.

Adam is experienced. Not in a concerning way, just in a way that has equipped him with a skill set that has him moving in certain ways, touching her in others, likely because they’d been positively received before.

Betty is less experienced. With Jughead, discovering what she liked, what made her feel good, was as much a learning experience for him as it was for her. They were always on the same page, sexually speaking, at least, because they’d started together.

Betty had simply figured it would just happen at some point with Adam. Now, she’s a little embarrassed about that assumption; it seems bold of her to assume he’d know the specific quirks of her body if she hasn’t mentioned them.

“This isn't an ego thing, Coops,” Adam tells her. “I want to make you feel good. I mean, you definitely make _me_ feel good.”

Betty gives a sly smirk. “Well, _that_ made me feel great.”

But she appreciates his effort; it’s not a given in college, where sexual satisfaction is often only thought of selfishly, so Betty instructs him, even though the experience leaves her a little red in the face. She’s never had to quite so explicitly tell someone what to do with her body before.

Adam balances himself over her, eager to learn, which is, admittedly, very Yale of him. “Is this good?” He slides a hand over her thigh, hooking it behind his back.

“Mhm.” She shuts her eyes as she focuses on the feeling. “Yeah. Yeah, just… a little higher—that’s good.”

He moves slowly, paying special attention to the tops of her breasts, which she’s always liked for some reason, the spot on her neck she likes kissed. He asks if it’s good, if she feels good, with each thing he does, and it’s working—she _is_ feeling good.

“Touch me,” Betty says, low and breathy, when she feels herself start to grow closer to the edge. But he’s moving quickly now, and even though he reaches between them gives her a rough, slightly erratic rub with the pads of his fingers, it isn’t quite enough to get her to come before he does.

“Sorry, Coops,” he says, rolling off her, voice still labored. “Next time.”

Betty shrugs. “That was nice.” She presses a kiss to his cheek. “Really, it was.”

When the leaves begin to crunch under her shoes, she sees Jughead again. It’s in the library, in the reading room, a few tables away from where she’d last talked to him nearly a year ago.

He’s with a girl who looks very different than she does. She’s all dark hair and heeled, chunky boots, higher than Betty would ever wear. Jughead is twenty years old and eight days old now, but he still looks the same. Boots. Flannel. Him, exactly as she remembers. They’re sitting next to each other, him and the different girl. They’re not doing anything affectionate, they’re not even touching. She’s reading, he has his computer open. But there’s a feeling, a closeness that radiates from them, and Betty simply knows.

Jughead looks up at her when she walks into the room with such directness and clairvoyant timing that she worries she’s accidentally called his name. Her breath catches—it’s been a while since he’s looked at her—and she didn’t expect he’d be doing it tonight.

So she looks, too. She examines the clarity in his eyes, the relaxed tilt of his shoulders, the way he leans back into his chair and stretches out his legs under the table, like he’s comfortable with who and where he is.

Then, she smiles.

He looks happy.

A genuine kind of happy, and that will always make her smile, even if she’s not the one to make him look that way.

She tries to put meaning into her smile, hoping it says what she’s verbally unable to: _hi, long time no see. Working hard or hardly working? Sorry, I know that was bad. You look good. Happy belated birthday. I didn’t say anything; I didn’t think you’d want me to, but I hope you know I didn't forget. I know who she is, you don’t have to say anything. I’ll go. You stay. I know now that it has to be like that. I’m sorry I didn’t before._

The corner of his mouth tugs up.

_Thank you for understanding. Thanks._

She gives herself a moment to linger even though it’s selfish of her, greatly so, and she remembers. How he’d laugh slightly when she’d miss and kiss that part of his mouth that’s smiling now when she was in a hurry. She wonders. How they might look if it were her there reading with him instead. What the depth and contours of their happiness might be.

That’s all she’s able to get to in a stolen moment.

Betty lifts her hand in acknowledgement. She doesn’t know if she means it as a hello or a goodbye, but she knows it doesn’t matter.

Jughead nods before he returns to typing.

And before the different girl has a chance to see her, before she has to see more of the different girl, Betty leaves.

That night, she tells Adam she isn’t feeling well. She half-expects him to show up at her door with chicken soup or ice cream, but she’s grateful he never does. Feeling unwell is not exactly a lie. It’s not exactly the truth, either, but it’s the best she can do without being able to pinpoint what she’s feeling with precision.

It’s a great mix of things—happiness, from the privilege of being able to see Jughead happy again, possibly some relief that she has not stolen his ability to feel that way forever. There is hope there, that the girl who looks so different from her is different in other ways as well. Maybe she won’t treat him as wretchedly if she is.

And deep down, because Betty kind of hates her, she is very guilty. It is strange to see someone occupying the life that if not for her own decisions, would’ve been hers. To know it may be happening in a space somewhere out there is one thing; to have to see it, is another. The reality of it, and the resignation she has no choice but to accept, both wring her heart like wet laundry.

Betty doesn’t know how to distill all that into communicable language, so she hopes that feeling unwell is good enough. It’s as close to the truth as she can get.

She spends the night confronting this unidentifiable, wordless feeling like a stranger. They sit in the darkness, crossed-legged and facing each other.

She asks it if it’s okay that she’s with Adam when she feels like this, and it asks her in return what exactly she thinks she’s doing wrong by being with him?

She likes Adam, right? _Yes._ She wants to be with him? _Yes._ Is she going to go up to Jughead and tell him that if she had the choice, it’d still be him? _No, never. That door’s closed now._ She wants to move on? _Genuinely._

Then what is there for her to do but move on?

Betty doesn’t cry. It’s not the physical action that’s naturally coming with whatever it is she’s feeling. She isn’t overwhelmingly sad anymore. She isn’t overwhelmingly anything anymore. It’s all like that now. The big feelings she’d had for him are all still there, but muted, attenuated from their original intensity. And with the time and distance they’ll continue to put between their new lives and the people they once were, Betty imagines that will only become more pronounced.

Jughead is happy, finally happy, and Betty is happy about that. Happy for him.

And it’s enough. It has to be; she can’t ask for anything more.

In the morning, it’s crisp and cool outside, harsh in places where summer had been gentle. There are new leaves on the ground, and Betty takes a moment to push up the sleeve of her sweater and feel the nip of the turning season on her skin.

She’s working through the _Scream_ trilogy with Adam the week before Halloween, when he asks, “You’re sure you don’t want to do a couple’s thing?” Betty pushes herself upright. “I have the Ghostface mask,” he continues. “And you’d make a rocking Sid, Coops. A blonde Sid.” Adam pats the top of her head. “But still, pretty rocking.”

“Okay, one—Sid and Ghostface? Isn’t that kind of tone deaf?” Adam smiles and shrugs. “And two, should I be concerned that you just casually have a Ghostface mask lying around?”

“I thought I’d use it to scare freshmen. Also, I wore it last year.”

“ _You’d_ commit the cardinal college sin of repeating a costume?”

“It’s no big,” he says easily. “We could even get you one of those old phones to carry around.”

It’s a sweet sentiment. Adam is Joe College; he takes every part of it seriously. He goes to office hours, sometimes just to chill with professors—they’re his friends as much as they are his teachers. He shows up at every party he’s been invited to, even if he’s up to his ears in work or nursing a hangover.

He adheres to arbitrary rules about having different Halloween costumes not only for every year it’s celebrated, but every night of each year, too. He Halloweeks with absolute seriousness. But—

“I can’t abandon Allie last-minute,” Betty answers. “She’s already melting down over this.”

This year’s group costume is the holidays. All Betty knows about it is that she’s supposed to show up in a Santa hat and a red dress, tinsel and baubles, if possible. There’s Easter, the Fourth of July, and Valentine’s Day, possibly Thanksgiving—a sexy turkey—definitely _not_ Cinco de Mayo, but the group has changed so much over the past few weeks because of, according to Allie, _flakey fucks_ , that Betty isn’t sure who’s doing what anymore.

But she’s not about to let another girlfriend down, even if it’s only over a Halloween costume.

Betty can tell Adam is disappointed, but he smiles anyway. “Can’t leave them without Christmas, Coops. Most important one of the lot.”

“It’s just a timing thing. And an Allie thing, not a you thing.”

“I know. But while we’re talking about your signature holiday...” Adam looks at her, expectant and slightly nervous. Betty thinks he looks cute like this. “You know that cabin my family has up in Maine, the one we do winter at every year?” She nods, remembering that Adam comes from the kind of family that uses seasons and holidays as verbs rather than nouns. They summer in Cape Cod, wearing Nantucket reds, autumn in the Catskills with the foliage.

“I know you have to Christmas with yours,” Adam clears this throat, “but are you doing anything after it?”

“After Christmas?” Her voice pitches up, high and childlike.

“We have all that time before we have to be back here.” Adam’s eyes are bright like a hopeful child’s. “Spare a week for me?”

“Oh!” Betty feels her own eyes widen. “That’s… Maine. Wow. It’s… Thank you.”

She sighs and groans internally. Thinks— _What the fuck, Coops?_

At least it’d been polite.

Betty is acutely aware that this is a big step, meeting Adam’s parents. It’s not the first time she’ll meet a boyfriend’s parents, but it’s the first time those parents have known her nearly her whole life.

Her plans for the break hadn’t been particularly exciting—hang around town a bit, maybe get ahead on some work, catch up on TV; stay inside, for the most part. There’s a difference between running into Jughead on campus, a place where she’s only thought of the kinds of memories they might’ve made together, and running into him back home. There, if she listens hard enough, she can still hear the echoes of who they once were: his bike’s rev, his voice telling her that he loves her. They both sting, they sting differently, and she doesn’t particularly feel the need to seek out that kind of pain while she’s home for the holidays.

Adam’s invitation puts her slightly on edge, like an exam she hasn’t spent enough time studying for. It feels fast and deeply serious. But there’s something mature about the way it sounds—spending a week up in Maine with her boyfriend and his parents—and so much of her _wants_ to be the person that does that kind of thing, who lives that sort of life.

Betty kisses his cheek. “Maine sounds like fun.”

During finals, Betty sees four bare breasts for the first time.

She’s coming home from the library, and even though Adam is perfectly happy for her to wander into his room or wake him up whenever—his roommate is, luckily for them, very chill—there are many merits to sleeping in her own bed sometimes. Dorm room beds may be extra-long, but they’re still twin sized.

Betty throws her door open. It takes her a minute to register the visual of Allie and another woman enthusiastically going at each others’ mouths, tops and bras off. Betty can’t help but stare for a moment; she’s never been in a scenario where not one, but two pairs of breasts are right in her face like that. Then, she slams the door shut.

“Sorry!” Betty yells at the wood. “I’m sorry! But carry on! Seriously, carry on, it’s good stress relief!”

She takes up momentary residence in the common room, and makes it through an episode and a half of _Barefoot Contessa_ before Allie’s guest wanders out of their room, with the most casual wave and chin-tilt. Betty tilts her chin in return.

“Sorry,” Allie says, wrinkling her nose slightly. “I thought you’d be with Adam.”

“Dude.” Betty is not sure she’s ever used the word _dude_ before, but it somehow feels right for the moment. _“Nice.”_

Betty swivels Allie’s desk chair towards its owner and sits down, cross-legged, the ‘ _details, please_ ’ position. Allie grins and pumps her eyebrows twice.

It is five in the morning, but Betty revels in the feeling that comes from building a language with a friend.

She goes to Maine in January, right before the semester begins. Her mother is phenomenally excited about this. Betty brings with her a couple bottles of maple syrup for Adam’s parents, tied with a red ribbon, because she’s sure Cheryl will descend on Maine and thump her if she doesn’t.

The Chisholms—their general air, the way they call Brooks Brothers clothing lounge and chore-wear—are intimidating, initially. But they are warm to her. They tell her to relax and call them Andrew and Andrea. They say that they’re all family here, and that Betty doesn’t need to be so shy or formal around them. Betty laughs lightly, and tells them she’s just nervous—they have a _great_ son, and she wants them to like her.

And really, it’s the truth. Adam is great, and Betty does want the Chisholms to like her. And she is nervous, but not about meeting them. She’s always been good at smiling and saying the right thing. She dresses smartly, is polite, and knows which fork to use for a given course. She goes to Yale. Parents tend to like those qualities in a girlfriend.

What makes her nervous is that Adam’s cabin reminds her an awful lot of Veronica’s, down to the topiaries lining the driveway.

It takes her back, to the guilt she’d felt; it returns to her the sense of failure that’d redistributed its weight and lessened through her body over the past year, and to the people she’d wronged. Even though Jughead might be sitting down at a similar dinner, miles away with his new girlfriend. Even though Betty hasn’t heard from Veronica since they were eighteen. She texts Veronica on her birthday every year, wishing her well, genuinely hoping she _is_ well. Betty does not mention the past or convey any long-winded apology when she does; it would not be what Veronica wants, and moreover, they’d be bad vibes for a birthday. It is simply a door Veronica can open if she ever wants to talk again. But so far, she never has.

At dinner with the Chisholms, while listening to Adam's parents reminisce about how they had met at Yale many moons ago, Betty washes down words that coat her cheeks with Chardonnay from a good year in Napa: _I cheated on my last boyfriend. I’ll never do it again, though, so no need to worry about your son._

But Adam’s parents look at her encouragingly, and that doesn’t waver. They melt when Adam puts his arm around her, naturally and unashamed, while they’re watching _The King’s Speech._

Mr. Chisholm—Andrew—takes a special liking to her when Adam mentions she’s not going to be a lawyer after trying her hand at the trade; he slaps his hand on the dinner table in excitement and says, _“Good!_ Mindless fucking career!” Andrea nearly faints at the language, and though Betty finds it slightly sad if that’s how Adam’s father truly feels about his day-to-day, she laughs, and the guilt ebbs.

She spends a week walking through snow that reaches her knees with Adam, cooking pasta and marinara sauce from scratch, drinking all kinds of expensive wine because the Chisholms think they’re both mature enough to do that. They have sex quietly in Adam’s room so his parents won’t hear, even though it’d simply been a given that she’d be sleeping in Adam’s room with him, instead of the guest bedroom. Her luggage had been placed there.

Gradually, Betty relaxes. A few times during the week, she even finds herself thinking: _Yes_ , _I’m in love. It’s a different kind of love, but it’s love. This is love. I’m sure of it._

_I’m pretty sure of it._

They go from the cabin straight back to school. Adam’s parents drop them off at the airport, and before Betty gets out of the car, Mrs. Chisholm takes both her hands and tells her how much she means it when she says that she hopes Betty can summer with them, at least a little, if she isn’t too busy with all the internships and jobs go-getters like her pursue. The Cape is beautiful then.

Betty smiles, she answers that she’ll try her best—shakily because it’s still intimidating to be folded into a family she doesn’t know well and hasn’t grown up with. But a little less so now.

Back at school, Betty is unlocking her door when Adam puts his hand over hers.

“I want to tell you something.” He turns her toward him. “I wanted to tell you the whole time in Maine actually, but I wanted to do it here.”

“Here?” Betty laughs. “In front of my door?”

“We first kissed here.” Adam takes her face in his hands. “My parents love you to pieces, Coops, and so do I.”

And then, with Adam’s hands still framing her cheeks, right in front of her door where they’d first kissed—Betty’s face crumples and she cries.

Loud, body-heaving, wracking sobs.

Right on cue.

It’s dark out when she wakes. Adam is sitting on the ground against the corner of her bed. He looks at her when she sits up, and Betty knows it’s over before he’s even said anything.

She’s familiar with that look. She’s seen it before, just on another face.

Adam rises slowly to sit on the far side of her bed.

“So.” There’s an attempt at levity in his voice, like he’s made up his mind about everything already so why not go for a little humor when it doesn’t matter anymore? “I gather those weren’t happy tears earlier.”

It’d been easy to weigh the possibility of love and how she might be feeling that way up at the cabin, in moments where she’d felt happy and taken care of, accepted. Those thoughts belonged to the confines of her own mind, so she could reconsider and adjust them as she understood their nuances better.

But then Adam had stood in front of her and made the feeling real, smiling as he handed her the microphone, expecting her to do the same, and the guilt that she’d put away knocked into her like a fly ball to the face. Because here she was again, standing in front of yet another person who loved her, needing to say something horrible in return, something too important to lie about or gloss over.

_I cheated on you with your best friend._

_No, I don’t love you; not right now, at least._

She’s close to it, she thinks, circling around it like liquid in a funnel before it sinks to the bottom. But she won’t— _can’t_ —say the words, not right now and not like this, because she will not, under any circumstance, intersect love and lies again.

“No,” Betty whispers after a while. “Those weren’t exactly happy tears.”

“You don’t love me.”

“It doesn’t mean I won’t later on. I like you. _So_ much.” Betty reaches for him, but he shifts away. “I like what we are together. I like _how_ we are.”

“I do, too, Betty, but later, when? It’s pretty late, as things go.”

“Is it?”

“You’ve met my family. We just spent an entire week in Maine. I’m serious about this. About us.”

She bristles. “I’m not being _casual._ I’m serious, too.”

Adam sighs. “It’s just all kind of terrifying for me.”

“I know. But I can’t give you a guaranteed date. I just… I need time.”

Adam brings one foot to rest on the opposite knee. “Can you even give me a guarantee?” he asks. “I know love doesn’t happen at the snap of a finger, but you can’t expect me to think it’s ever going to when your reaction to me loving you is… _that._ It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, Coops.”

Her answer is there, lying in wait behind her teeth: _No, I can’t guarantee that I’ll love you._ But, it sounds cold and harsh, after he’s been good to her, cruel, like she’s taken yet another person’s heart and stomped all over it without a thought or reason why.

“I don’t think I can keep doing this,” Adam says eventually. “Continuing to be more in love with you while waiting on an unsure thing.”

Her throat is constricting quickly, so Betty just nods.

This entire conversation is an out-of-body experience; she is aware it is happening, but it is dreamlike and disorienting, like she isn’t really living it. She is an observer in another person’s life, watching it unfold.

“I understand.” There’s more she could say, but none of the words she can truthfully offer are the specific things Adam wants and needs to hear; when the towel is tossed in, there’s not much she can do to make anyone stay. Nor does she want them to, really, not against their will.

Adam rises, moves to leave, but stops abruptly at her door.

“Does it have something to do with him?” He turns back. “Your ex, I mean. From your town.”

Adam knows about Jughead; she’d been honest with him there and told him early on that she dated someone in high school who, in a strange turn of events, ended up at the same school as her, but it’d ended badly. It was a conversation in superficial, rough details—no names, no extrapolation on what ‘badly’ really meant. But she’d figured Adam deserved to know that much, at least.

“I know him, actually. He was in that non-fiction writing sem I took. Has a lot of loud opinions. Dickish about them sometimes. Jughead, right?”

Betty wonders why Adam never told her before.

“No, it’s not about him,” Betty answers firmly, even as she considers how true that is. It may not be about Jughead in a direct or specific sense, like it had been directly about Archie and her transgressions there, but it’s naive of her to think their past hasn’t at all influenced her present. Maybe she’s slower to love now because of Jughead, or not able to yet, or at all. If any of that is true, then, in a way, it is about Jughead—at least a little.

“Jug isn’t… Jughead isn’t in my life anymore. I don’t mean anything to him.”

“But does he mean something to you?”

“I don’t think anyone I shared time with like that could ever become meaningless to me. I don’t just mean that about him. I mean that about you, too.” Betty answers Adam quietly; she thinks this might be a universal phenomenon, though she’s unsure.

Adam sighs, and she knows whatever answer or reassurance she’s looking for won’t be coming from him.

“Adam, wait.” He looks back, expectant. “I didn’t cheat on you. You should… I want you to know that.”

He is confused only momentarily; it is not a particularly difficult two-and-two to put together. Betty doesn’t know if he means to look disappointed, as though he finally understands something monumentally mysterious about her, but she sees it regardless.

“I never thought you did,” Adam says before he leaves.

She feels like the embodiment of sin.

She feels and feels like many things. She’s lonely without Adam. It is a very shocking deprivation of presence. On the plane, they’d just been talking about which restaurant to make Valentine’s Day reservations for.

She misses Jughead. She always does to some degree, but it’s especially pronounced now. She wishes she could just talk to him, more than anything, have him walk her through her muddled mind, levy a little clarity.

She’s annoyed with her phone, an inanimate object. It won’t stop blowing up with people who’ve found out and are now wondering what happened and if she’s okay. She’s a little annoyed with the people asking, too, but she’s mostly grateful they care enough about her to check in.

She is Betty Cooper, a second-semester sophomore. She is a recently-declared English-Psychology double-major; she had not, eventually, waffled from that. She is a complete fucker. She feels guilt, and is very guilty.

There’s someone out there hurting because of her, someone she wonders if she should never have been with in the first place if she was that unsure of her capacity to love him.

And there’s someone else out there, too, the original someone who she hurt and who may still be hurting, someone she never has, and will never be able to make it up to. She’s never righted that wrong, and now there’s another on her plate.

It eats at her, chewing away at the parts of her that make her function. She misses all kinds of people in varying degrees and numerous ways, and is so unsure of whether the sadness is feeding into the guilt, the guilt into the sadness, or if there might even be another system she has not yet recognized, undetected and at work. She wonders if the fact that she misses someone has anything to do with love or not. Analyzes where her right decisions had been and where they’d started to go wrong. Tries to unpick each feeling from the knot they’d tangled into, so she can address them individually.

But, she doesn’t quite know where or how to start.

Allie texts her a link to the school’s mental health website without commentary. Betty can tell Allie is worried. She’s gone from enthusiastically suggesting they drink their problems away, to sincerely offering to talk and cry, to tiptoeing around, asking quiet, careful questions like if she’s been able to go to class that day, or if she’s eaten anything, what she can bring her if not.

Betty knows she has spiraled into a place she can’t climb out of alone, so she makes an appointment with one of the school’s mental health counselors. For Allie’s sake, so as to not let down a friend again.

And for her own, as well.

Her assigned therapist’s name is Patti Pacer. Her hair is white and she wears a matching Van Cleef and Arpels necklace-and-earring clover set.

Betty prepares notes for the session, the direction she wants the conversation to go in, and an opening that consists of: _I am the worst person alive. I am the guiltiest person alive, and I need to know what to do with that._

Instead, sitting in front of a woman who reminds her of her grandmother, what comes out, small and childlike, is, “My boyfriend broke up with me.”

But Patti is understanding about it.

Later that night, she is scrolling through Instagram when she comes across a photo of Jughead. Betty sits up, scrunching her blankets under her feet.

It isn’t his photo, it’s Tomoko’s, a junior Betty knows from the _News._ From the general scene, the photo is from Tomoko’s study-abroad homecoming she’d missed Saturday night.

Betty mentally kicks herself for staying in, but not too much. It’s not like she would’ve done anything more than nod politely at Jughead, had she gone.

Jughead is standing in the background, near a Chat Noir poster. He looks older, like he’s lost the final hints of teenage innocence. His cheekbones stand out more. His shoulders have filled out, too—very slightly, but there’s more there. He’s smiling a little. Tomoko and the group of girlfriends in the foreground block most of the person standing in front of him. Betty can tell, though, even though they’re not physically touching, it’s the girl she’d seen him with in the library. Same hair, same shoes.

 _They’re still together_ , she thinks, then stops immediately before she has a chance to unravel that thread further. Instead, she looks back at him, analyzing the changes on his face, the ones she probably wouldn’t be able to recognize as easily if she saw him every day, grown used to them as he’d grown into them.

It is uncomfortably effortless, the way she’s still able to picture herself with him; how she can shut her eyes and imagine herself in his girlfriend’s place.

Closing the distance and tucking herself under his chin. Leaning her head back against his shoulder. Casually weaving their fingers together.

She looks for a minute more, then scrolls past the photo.

Patti Pacer, Ph.D. is an open-ended questions kind of therapist. Betty doesn’t mind them sometimes, when they’re questions like _“How are you today, Betty?”_ or _“How are classes, Betty?”_ She’s generally able to provide decent answers to those.

But when Patti asks questions like, _“Tell me about Adam. You said you felt like you were horrible to him. Why is that?”_ Betty minds them a little more. Those kinds lead to big, uncomfortable concepts she doesn’t know how to deal with on her own, and she’s always tempted to bite back with something like, _“Why don’t you and your three degrees tell me? It’s why I’m here.”_

She never does, though.

Betty shifts in her seat, wondering if Patti knows just how exacting her gaze is. “I… don’t know.”

Her face immediately twitches; it’s a cop-out of an answer.

“Somewhere along the line, Adam started loving me and I didn’t start loving him,” she tries again. “And that ended up hurting him.”

“We can’t control our emotions, Betty.” Patti reminds her of this point a lot. “Or the speed in which they do or don’t show up. You can’t control love any more than you can control feeling sad about something or laughing about something funny.”

“I know,” she says. “I _know_ that. But I was with him. I was his girlfriend and that means something. There are responsibilities that come with that and I was—” Betty fists her hands. “I was irresponsible and now he’s hurt. There were things Adam wanted and needed from me that I wasn’t able to give.”

“Like your guarantee that you’d love him, for example?”

Betty nods, then interrupts before Patti reminds her again about the uncontrollable nature of her emotions. “I know I can’t control who I love or on what timeline I love them. But it’s just common sense to presume that the person you’re with will need love at some point, and I should’ve predicted that.”

“There is a difference between understanding that people need love and the ability to guarantee it.”

Verbally, Betty supposes there is, but she’s not sure that practically or realistically speaking, there’s that much nuance between the two.

“What are your responsibilities in a relationship, Betty?”

“Like in... list format?”

“If you’d like.”

“To not cheat on him with his best friend.” Patti raises an eyebrow, but she’s not being facetious. “To communicate and be honest. Truthful. Be supportive and caring. Things of that nature.”

“Is that all?”

Betty thinks. Based on Patti’s tone, there’s likely something major she’s forgetting.

“I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all I can come up with right now.”

“What about your responsibilities to yourself?” Patti asks after a beat. “Do you think you have any responsibilities toward your own heart and happiness?”

 _“Oh.”_ Self-care and self-love are big parts of Patti’s ethos, so Betty will nod along when they’re being discussed, even though she thinks Patti might take the concepts too far on occasion.

“I guess just… being clear about the things I want and need.” Betty looks over at Patti. “Being honest with myself and knowing if I’m happy,” she continues. “Knowing what’s enough for me and what isn’t. To… try? I don’t know if that makes sense. Try as in working hard at doing all the above.”

Patti gives a couple measured nods. “I didn’t hear making sure you love someone on their timeline or guaranteeing you’ll love them one day on either of your lists. But those are the things making you feel badly, regardless.”

“Maybe those things should be on my list.”

That earns her a raised eyebrow.

“It’s a huge responsibility, promising you’ll be able to control something uncontrollable. Do you think you have the ability to guarantee you’ll love anyone before you do?” Patti adjusts her glasses. “I’m not sure anyone does, Betty.”

“Yes, but you don’t know how easy Adam made it for me to love him. There are literally thousands of people out there right now.” Betty jabs a pointed finger at Patti’s window. “My friends, distraught over guys who keep- do you know what ghosting is? You do? That’s what they keep doing. I had someone who didn’t do that. Adam bought me a ticket to Maine so I could meet his parents. He was present. He was _really_ good to me, and I couldn’t...” Her hands are moving in front of her, but when she can’t find the precise words, her fingers curl in frustration.

“You couldn’t promise him something you don’t have the capacity to promise anyone?” Patti finishes. Betty lets her hands fall to her lap with a soft slap. “You are not responsible for producing anyone’s happiness but your own, Betty. You can certainly contribute to it, and it’s important to mindfully do so in a healthy relationship. But we don’t have the ability to guarantee someone else’s happiness—especially not by pledging more of ourselves that we can give.”

Patti looks at her. Betty looks back. It goes on like that for a few minutes.

“I’m getting the sense you don’t quite agree,” Patti says eventually.

Betty would run out the door before she cries in front of Patti, but the urge is there. “I don’t, because I destroyed someone once,” she says quietly. “I took his entire emotional system and bulldozed it for no reason. I love him and I did that— _I_ did that horrible thing. Me. I have _no_ idea why, and I’ve been over it and over it and _over it_ in my mind. It goddamn _keeps me up at night_ , the whole thing with Archie, and how I could’ve ever, even for a moment—”

Patti shifts, and suddenly aware of how much of her voice is filling the room, Betty pauses before bringing her voice back down to its regular decibel and cadence.

“I promised myself that I’d be better. That would be my way of making it right and finding... redemption. I’d be a better girlfriend. I’d take better care of the kind of love I threw away before. I wouldn’t hurt the next person who loved me. But—” Betty throws up her hands _._

“This is Jughead, right?” Patti flips her notes. “This someone from before you’re talking about?”

Betty nods. They haven’t talked much about Jughead yet, but the mood shifts, her stomach twists, and she knows that’s about to change.

“Yeah.” Her voice is shaky. “That’s him.”

The thought that she’s never looked redemption up in the dictionary wakes her one night. It is a very dramatic moment, as those go. The realization worms its way into her REM cycle and knocks its way past her dreams. It pokes at the center of her brain, and jolts her awake, all the way upright like in the movies. It has her reaching for her computer at four in the morning.

Betty sets her laptop down on the corner of her desk nearest to her bed, on top of her battered copy of _The Divine Comedy_ , and blinks rapidly as her eyes adjust to the backlight.

The first definition is so unhelpful that Betty snorts—redemption is the action of being saved from sin; it is the thing that saves a person from sin and evil.

She thinks— _What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?_

It’s a fantastically useless definition. It doesn’t tell her anything about how she might go about seeking it. It uses vague, indefinite words like “action” and “thing,” as if she, the reader consulting this dumb book, would know what to substitute for those words.

The second definition is slightly more helpful; redemption can be gaining something in exchange for something else. And archaically, it’s the action of buying one’s freedom.

Betty snaps her computer shut when Allie abruptly throws up an arm before rolling over.

It’s reassuring, Betty thinks, laying back down. Comforting, that the good she’s trying to do, the better person she’s trying to be, even if she fails at it, isn’t going out into some unknown aether. It’s part of a process, with freedom, or something like it at the other end; it’s part of a system of reciprocity.

She doesn’t quite know what exactly she’s freeing herself from yet or what she’s getting in exchange—the ability to understand why she’d done what she’d done, a guiltless conscience, perhaps.

But she feels lighter, knowing what she knows, regardless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up - Jughead. He speaketh.
> 
>  **Archie Comics Characters Roundup (from Wikipedia)**  
>    
> Adam Chisholm (Betty’s boyfriend, the guy in B/J fic forever destined to be forever alone) - “He is Archie’s main rival for Betty’s affections.” Lol. Not here he isn’t.
> 
> Patti Pacer (Betty’s therapist) - [one of] “Riverdale High’s female coaches who specifically teach the girls’ teams.”
> 
> Tomoko Yoshida (Betty’s friend from the News) - “A new Japanese exchange student who hangs around Betty… she is an excellent writer and works on the school paper.”


End file.
